


Saint Rose and the Thorns

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Established Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Mutual Pining, POV Multiple, Wizard Rock, Wizarding Politics (Harry Potter), Yearning Longing Pining Etc.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:55:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 75,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29534376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: The Tower, the Three of Swords, and the Two of Cups reversed. Or: the trials and tribulations of the early reign of Saint Rose, 1992-1993.
Series: In the Garden [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/734235
Comments: 19
Kudos: 10





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> NB: this story will make a lot more sense to you if you have read the previous installments of the series. 
> 
> as usual in this series, i am serious about the tags (and am open to adding more if you feel i may be missing something). please also don't hesitate to let me know if i've gotten anything wrong, i promise i will be receptive.

**Saint Rose and the Thorns**  
 _Daily Prophet_ Weekend Arts Section cover story, November 1992  
by Nina Swift, arts correspondent

The sound of wizarding London in 1992 is the sound of Saint Rose: otherwise known as Hobgoblins rhythm section turned rock royalty in the semi-superhuman form of multi-instrumentalist Imani Rose and bassist Flora St. James. Solo on the debut LP _Severe Asceticism_ — “I want you to write down that Flora and I played every single track on that record,” Imani insists toward the beginning of our interview — they’re joined onstage by Graeme Sugarbush on guitar and Sal Abidi on drums, an incendiary quartet that brings to mind wizarding rock’s answer to Throwing Muses or the Breeders. They’ll next appear at Knockturn Alley’s own Dyatlov and Roswell on December 12, at the St. Mungo’s benefit gig curated by their former Hobgoblins bandmate Stubby Boardman, alongside the Weird Sisters, the Sluagh, and newcomers Double Double. Our correspondent caught up with the quartet at the seediest tea rooms they could find…

NS: Insert obligatory Hobgoblins question here.

FLORA: Well, a hobgoblin is generally considered to be a friendly but mischievous spirit, living in the fireplace and doing little chores…

GRAEME: They're one of those magical creatures the existence of which hasn’t necessarily been conclusively proven or disproven.

IMANI: Only circumstantial evidence either way exists, at best.

NS: Alright… What about how you wrote the record?

FLORA: Over very many years, and then all in one go with an out-of-tune guitar in a leaky tent in a cold rainforest, and then we cleaned up the loose ends in the studio.

IMANI: Mostly in the dead of night when the other was asleep so that she wouldn’t hear.

NS: And the live set? Your August residency at D&R, and subsequent autumn U.K. tour, garnered rave reviews.

IMANI: We asked two of the best musicians we know to get over here to London and help us mess the songs up.

FLORA: They didn’t come, so we had to get Sal and Graeme.

[ laughter ]

NS: Another of the most talked about new bands of this year, Draught of Living Death, seems conspicuously absent from the benefit show lineup —

FLORA: You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Boardman.

IMANI: I think some people — I hesitate to call them artists — might be uncomfortable having their band associated with a fundraising campaign for an AIDS ward.

NS: Do you have anything to say to Draught of Living Death? They certainly take any opportunity to say something about you.

[ laughter ]

SAL: I would advise that they come see us play live and take notes. They could use it.

NS: Imani, what about you?

IMANI: There’s nothing I can say to anybody who refuses to see my humanity.

-

\--

\---

**June 1993**

For an indeterminable period of time, perhaps half again the length of his lifetime, or otherwise the blink of an eye, he floated like a dead astronaut in the bath of darkness. The sound of the darkness was a continuous drone that sparked and spiked palpable feedback appearing in washes of color without name and scarcely comprehensible to the human eye. So too was the sound like the color and the color like the sound so that sometimes the sound was only color and other times the color was only sound… But otherwise there was no feeling at all, even though in the world of life and consciousness Sal and Moira and Kelton were dragging his limp body out of the shuddering, collapsing concert hall at Dyatlov & Roswell and into the wet street along with the rest of the sold-out crowd who had been lucky or unlucky enough (the quality of the luck had changed in an instant, as it was wont to do in those days, the early days of the war) to attend the second-to-last Saint Rose show of the endless _Severe Asceticism_ tour.

The body was deposited in the vestibule of a magical antiques dealer across the street and propped up against the wall. On account of the mixedness of the magical blood present on that sidewalk the eyes of every possessed doll in that window — there were more than few — swiveled in their motley direction.

“What happened?”

“Is he dead?”

“Are the cops coming?”

“Where are the girls?”

Sal, good friend that he was, or otherwise equivalently deep in denial, would never tell anyone he had done this before, not long before, in fact, but he lifted the body’s chin (not necessarily Graeme’s chin, because Graeme's wasn’t there) with the side of his hand and pressed two fingers against the carotid artery. “His heart's like a bloody hummingbird,” he told Moira and Kelton. “What happened?”

“He just went away,” said Kelton. “Where are Imani and Flora?”

“They went looking for the man in green.”

“Who?”

“The fucker who did this!”

Behind them, across the street, the concert hall groaned and collapsed inward by another square foot. All the old wood and brick creaked and shook and shivered like Frankenstein's Monster as it settled. If they hadn't gotten the doors open it would have long since begun to crush them all alive. The fifteen hundred refugees from inside had washed up in the street in varying states of shock and horror. Not far now, through the rain-smeared, tangled moonlight midnight streets, they could hear the telltale haunted wail of MLE sirens drifting closer.

It was not so much that something was ending and something else was beginning as that the future they all should have long ago accepted was upon them had finally kicked in the door and taken up residence.

You're not going to like this, said the bath of darkness, but you should probably go back now.

\---

\--

-

**1.**

**February 1992**

In London, Graeme was sick for a week. Shivering alone in the bed in the guest room upstairs in Imani and Flora’s townhouse on the Belgrade Road in Shacklewell. Occasionally he would venture downstairs in the pajamas they had lent him at hours when they were sure to be asleep or out on errands and would make himself a drink with hot water and lemon and honey and scotch whiskey. It was rather fine scotch whiskey to be mixing with but it was the only liquor in the house and he figured pretty soon he could buy them another bottle because he had managed through the fever haze to read a few times over the contract they had presented him with at the offices of Hellfire Club Records, off the balcony of the ancient club called Dyatlov & Roswell on Knockturn Alley, the day of his arrival, his first time ever in a foreign country other than Canada, no passport, twenty-two years old, running a fever of one-hundred-three degrees. He signed it without reading it, and then back in Shacklewell Flora sat him down on the couch and put a thermometer under his tongue. She and Imani discussed the result in Celsius for a few minutes. “What are you talking about,” Graeme asked them. Their faces and their voices were swimming. He felt like the old metaphor about the frog in boiling water who doesn’t realize it’s gotten any hotter until it’s cooked.

“Maybe you should go upstairs and lie down.”

The moral of the story was that his compensation to play guitar on tour with Imani and Flora had been disclosed in the contract. It was more than he had ever been paid in dollars, except it was in pounds, which meant it was even more. Which meant it was nearly double. As such he could afford to buy them a new bottle of scotch, perhaps even a nicer bottle of scotch.

He heated up a can of soup on the stove, sitting on the fine black-and-white tile floor, nursing the whiskey lemon thing. This, he was telling himself, was for his throat, which felt like some death-bird made of flames and ash had built a nest of nails inside it. Outside the sirens were different and so was the light. Not altogether unlike the light of the American northwest but paler and the clouds were higher and moved more slowly. A different dark grey-brown light like the city’s industrial history had sat over it and wouldn’t move. Once he had eaten he got his guitar and sat on the couch and put the vinyl master of Imani and Flora’s new record on the turntable and listened and tried to think up ways to play along. Moving his fingers without sound through the chords, not looking at the instrument or at the record player, watching across the room at the light in the window, listening. This necessitated another whiskey lemon thing, and after that there were no more lemons. He took a cold shower sitting cross-legged in the bathtub and then he lay down in the sweaty bed again. Slept, or not. Bad dreams. A lot of trying not to think about the events of the prior week. He did think about asking how he could get a prescription for Valium, but wondered if the implied disclosure — _I can’t sleep because my brain is moving too fast and alcohol doesn't always help anymore —_ might invalidate his contract.

One or both of the girls came home. “How’s this,” Graeme said. Played them through the licks. Sometimes he thought maybe they would make no sense to anyone else. The fever brain processed them like the Beatles’ Leslie cabinet.

“You should be resting,” Imani said, feeling his forehand with the back of her hand. She felt bad that he was sick, as though it were not his own fault. Sooner or later you’re going to realize your mistake, Graeme couldn’t help but think before his brain flinched away from it.

Flora went and got her bass and played along. “Fucking cool,” she said. “How’d you even think of that.”

“It’s the delirium.”

Flora laughed. She had a wonderful big cackling English laugh that made Graeme laugh. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

“I’m easy. Just chicken soup and lemons.”

“That reminds me, I got some more.”

They went in the kitchen together and he made them each a whiskey lemon thing, and then they went back and played a few more of the songs. Imani came back from her errands. “You are white like sheet!” she announced in this impression of a kind of overbearing Russian schoolmarm she did sometimes, mostly to make Flora laugh, but she went and got her keyboard and a glass of wine.

“Okay,” said Graeme, “this is what I have for ‘Feast Day in Hell.’”

“Oh, shit,” said Imani.

“What’s wrong?”

Imani looked to Flora with a kind of sarcastic desperation. “I’m sensitive about this one,” she said.

“I would be too. Wray had this bootleg of you guys playing it with the Hobgoblins in fucking 1984.” How to delicately tell them, listen, I fairly worship the ground the guys walk on as much as anybody, but that was eight years ago, and I’m a better guitar player than Jack Childermass and Ras Boardman combined? “The new version is different anyway, so — and besides, it’s your song, this is just an idea, just a thought, and you can obviously say no — ”

Imani exhaled like a yoga teacher. “Just play it, Graeme, go ahead.”

This had been a tough one to work out, but he was proud of what he'd come up with. There were three or four guitar tracks on the record that he could make out, and it was going to be impossible to play all of them at once, but it could be fudged with a few different feedback spells, and by moving quickly through the arpeggiating scales. He heard Flora jump in deftly with a dancing tag high on the neck of her bass. Playing with her was different than with a bassist like Mercedes, who essentially played a third rhythm guitar tuned a few steps down. Flora knew instinctually how to shape what she played around a guitar line to accentuate its weirdnesses. Sometimes he thought he knew what she was going to play before she played it, just because it would make such perfect sense. She followed him, adapting her bassline from the record around his version of the guitar track, and then Imani’s keys droned in, and then her voice, though he could barely hear it over the sounds of the instruments, except at the chorus, where she pushed her singing into a shout:

_You thought you knew me well_  
_Just enough to sell  
_ _It's feast day in hell!_

Somewhere deep in the realm of memory he remembered being fourteen years old, on the bus to some or another Denny Academy field trip, sitting in the back with Wray, sharing the tattered headphones of Wray’s cassette player, listening to Ras and Jack scream those words over a roaring crowd. He let himself get lost in the layers of noise, mentally shifting them through filters of distortion and amplification, and when the song was over he looked up. Imani was staring at him with her eyebrow cocked high on her forehead. “Well,” she said.

Flora was biting back her big English laugh. “Mani,” she said, grinning.

“That was good,” Imani said diplomatically.

“Yeah,” Flora told her. “I mean, it’s a fucking banger.”

“Amortentia is saying we can't release it as a single,” Imani explained, turning to Graeme, “because — they say! — it was on some questionably official Hobgoblins live album. Probably that bootleg tape you had. Ras even signed off on it, but… I mean, we’re like slabs of beef in their minds. So I feel like it has to be the best song in the live show to spite them.”

“Alright,” said Graeme. “It can be better, I’ll make it better.”

“I’m probably going to regret this,” Imani said, “because — ”

“ — she’s sensitive about this one — ”

“Because,” Imani went on, side-eyeing Flora, “I’m sensitive about this one, it was the first song we wrote together, Flor!”

“Was it?”

“Yes!” She pursed her mouth and looked to Graeme again. “I think you should do whatever the fuck you want. Like, don’t even worry about our guitar tracks on the record. Write something completely fucking batshit. With just one caveat in mind: if any of them, I mean Mitzi, I mean any of the fucking execs or the board, if they come to any of our shows, I want their heads to explode.”

“Okay.” He thought about some of the riffs he’d been working on for the purely hypothetical Crucia LP2. “I can do that.”

“It was really good, Graeme, but, you know, spite.” She waved a fist aloft. “Spite!”

“That’s the name of your next album,” Graeme said, and they all laughed, but, indeed, it would be.

“There’s a lot of bad blood between us and Amortentia at this juncture,” Flora explained. Graeme knew that one of the errands they were always on was going by the label offices to take care of what they called ‘divorce proceedings.’ “It isn’t going to get better, so you may as well get used to it.”

“We tried to bring the record to them first,” Imani said, wincing.

“What happened?”

“Well,” Flora said, “first, they did the same thing they always did to the Hobgoblins records…”

Imani put on a posh accent and imitated a kind of stuffy boardroom lawyer Graeme assumed to be Mitzi. “We simply can’t put out an album with these political themes, in these times…”

“And then they wanted us to hire this guitar player — God, this asshole. Football hooligan type… his name was, like, Winthrop…”

“Winston Tottenham Jr.,” Imani enunciated with disgust. “Guitarist from one of their other bands, they had, like, one hit in America, so, you know.”

“Is that really a thing here?”

“Oh, god, yes.”

“Anyway, they were like, Sugarbush is a virtuoso but he’s got _baggage_.”

Graeme laughed. Then he wondered if it was funny.

“We were like, the Crucia self-titled is the wizarding equivalent of _Nevermind_. You want us to be big in America…”

“They also didn’t want us to get Sal,” Imani pointed out. “Because he’s brown and Muslim. And because — well, the other thing.”

“What other — ”

“Plus, they’re evil vultures,” Flora said, “so we went to Hellfire Club, even though they’re so much smaller.”

“They seem really nice,” Graeme said lamely, having met the label manager, Evvy Mitchell, just once about ten days previous when he'd gone by the offices to take care of the paperwork, feeling so weak and miserable that the teacup she’d given him clattered wildly against the saucer every time he picked it up.

“You’ll like Sal, too,” Imani said. “He’s coming on Friday. I said we’d meet him at Euston.”

By the time they piled onto the Number 73 bus toward the city that Friday morning, Graeme was better-ish enough except for a strange hacking cough that would surface itself like some eldritch leviathan from the murky depths of his lungs once a day or so for a couple months without explanation. And, together, having not slept a wink the previous night in favor of rehearsing in the magically soundproofed basement, playing along to a drum machine Imani said had been programmed by none other than Ras Boardman, the three of them had sketched out an insane coda for the live variation on “It’s Feast Day in Hell.”

“Sal will fill it in,” Flora said assuredly. She was rolling herself a cigarette, curly temple resting against the foggy bus window “He’s the best drummer on earth. No offense, Imani.”

“None taken. I mean, you’re right.”

Graeme thought of Devon Rice in Terrormancy in the summer of 1986, when the band had taken Seattle by almost literal storm. Devon had probably been the best drummer he'd ever seen. He hadn’t done much looking at Devon the first few times, because Lockett had been the best guitar player he'd ever seen, and in those days he’d looked even more like hell had choked on him and spat him back out. Graeme and Wray had been maybe sixteen, not that Lockett and Devon were much older. The first couple times they went to the Den to watch Terrormancy play, Graeme remembered feeling legitimately afraid. All the noise had hewn a kind of door into the world which opened into an incomprehensible new reality. He spent at least one entire show trying to decipher all of the magic Lockett used on his guitar, and also the fresh-looking, scabby tattoos on Lockett’s knuckles which said WOLF TRAP. Then Wray had said, out on the street after, “Did you see the drummer?” Graeme had been embarrassed that he'd had to say no.

Anyway, Devon was dead, so it was all moot. Besides, Graeme didn’t like fighting with Imani and Flora (at least not yet) and he had heard Sal’s playing on a couple of cassette releases and had been impressed by its heavy thunderousness. He was in a band called Crushing Valerian, after all. Devon had played for speed — to keep up with Lockett, who was always trying to throw Montclair off his vocal line by playing as quickly and arrhythmically as possible. Sal played to shake the earth.

The bus wended its way through traffic. Flora dozed off against the window and Imani leant her head against her shoulder. Graeme peered past them out the foggy window at the city. London was sort of unbelievable. Thousands of years of monumentally different styles of architecture and building materials piled up on top of each other stretching toward the towering gray sky. There was always new supplanting the old, somehow quite quickly, even though it was likely every construction pit was an archeological site of vital historical significance. On the narrow sidewalks down the high street suits mingled with mods mingled with old hippies mingled with grannies in lace pushing carts and kids in colorful stripes and bucket hats and oversize jeans. It was like you could turn a corner and find the Beatles or Monty Python or Jack Sheppard or a legion of Roman centurions.

“You’ve never been here before,” Imani whispered, smiling at him. “I keep forgetting.”

“It’s incredible.”

“It’s just Islington,” Imani said. “Wait until we take you to Hyde Park.”

“It feels like you could live here your whole life and still get lost.”

Imani nodded. “I’ve been all over the world but I keep coming back here. Sometimes I think something might be wrong with me.”

They cut past the canals behind Kings Cross, and then Imani shook Flora’s knee and they stumbled out together into the sudden and all-too-temporary lifting of the veil of clouds from the sun. Imani led the way toward the station through the crowds, occasionally looking back to make sure that Graeme and Flora were following. In the station, standing under the fluorescent board listing track numbers and departure and arrival times, continually jostled by commuters in suits, Flora leaned her forehead against Graeme's shoulder and nearly fell asleep again. “How will we recognize Sal,” Graeme asked Imani.

“Looks like an Arabic movie star,” Imani said, scanning the crowd. “Irish brogue. Muggle hardcore band t-shirt.”

Graeme’s head was spinning simply trying to imagine such a person on so little sleep. “Got it,” he said. But in the end none of them noticed Sal until he came up behind them and tapped Imani on the shoulder.

The description was somehow accurate, right down to the Void t-shirt and the Fugazi patch on his fifty-liter backpack. There was a paper-thin tear just beneath his shirt collar, showing a glimpse of colorful ink. On account of all the psychedelic drugs and very dangerous magic he had done in his life (Graeme learned about all this later), he had a great meditative stillness to his person which perhaps could be perceived from a great distance if you were paying attention. If he looked like a movie star, which wasn’t untrue, it was some kind of brilliant method actor who had immersed himself in the role of a Dublin crust punk and yet still took the time to groom his (objectively perfect) facial hair. He hugged each of the girls and then he shook Graeme's hand. “Sal Abidi,” he said.

“Graeme Sugarbush. I’ve heard great things.”

Sal winked at Imani. “They’re all true,” he told Graeme.

They went out again into the day to find it had started raining. Sal had slung an arm over each of the girls’ shoulders so that Graeme had to walk behind them, feeling all of a sudden like a neglected little dog.

They went back to the house on the bus, talking about how long it had been and all their friends in common and all the relevant wizarding band gossip with little to no regard for various statues of secrecy. Graeme hovered like a boring ghost, occasionally jostled between Sal’s huge pack and the staid businessman at his other side. “Do you hear from Jack,” Sal asked finally.

Graeme hadn’t yet gotten up the chutzpah to ask Imani and Flora this extremely tantalizing question and braced himself for a total shutdown of conversation. He hadn't even asked Imani about this when they were first getting to know each other in Seattle the previous year. With absolutely no prompting, Flora had started talking about it while drunk at Linda’s, which had led Alex to tell her about Wray. A wound for a wound, Graeme had thought then, watching beads of condensation trace finger-thin stripes down the foggy window.

“Once in a while,” Flora told Sal, shrugging.

“Got a letter from him the other day,” Imani said. “Sal, you should write him, he’d like that. He says he gets out in another year, if he’s good, so they tell him.”

“Have you been to see him?”

Imani and Flora shared a meaningful look. “Imani has,” said Flora.

“What about Ras?”

There was that meaningful look again. Graeme met Sal’s eyes briefly — it was almost heartening to both be outsiders, even if only for a moment.

“What _about_ Ras,” said Imani, folding her arms over her chest.

“You already know his solo record tanked,” Flora said.

“Just as well.” Sal shrugged. “It wasn't very good.”

“Agreed, but, well. He's very depressed these days. It’s only a matter of time until he turns into one of those upper class eccentrics who hides in his dusty old house dressing like the curtains until he dies of a chill.”

“Are Ras and Jack speaking to each other anymore?”

Imani looked up at Graeme from her seat. He watched her evaluate what to say. “You know what, Sal, I should say, I don't really care, and frankly it's none of my business.”

They piled out of the bus on the corner of the Stoke Newington Road and headed down the quiet streets. “But,” said Sal.

“But what?”

“You said that’s what you _should_ say.”

Flora shoved him playfully. “How about you just go look at old issues of _W.R.W._ on microfiche?”

“Listen,” Sal laughed, “I said I’d play with you girls as long as the Hobgoblins weren’t getting back together, but that doesn’t mean I can’t painstakingly orchestrate a reunion via extensive reverse psychology…”

At the house, Sal dropped his backpack in the living room, and Flora checked the phone messages, transcribing a particularly infuriating one from Mitzi Love to worry about later. Imani made tea and they milled about aimlessly in the living room for a few awkward minutes until Imani said, rubbing the back of her neck, “So, you heard the songs.”

Sal gave her another wink. “I did,” he said.

“Think you could play them?”

“I'd say I could.”

Downstairs in the basement all the magic was still humming from their all-night jam session. “What the fuck happened down here,” Sal said, looking around a little bewilderedly. “Have you guys been summoning demons?”

“Not far from it,” Flora said, sitting down on her amp to tune her bass.

“We wrote this whole face-melting coda for ‘Feast Day In Hell,’” Graeme explained.

Sal went and parked himself behind the drum kit, carefully moving the cymbals closer and the toms further and testing the bass drum and the snares. “Shall we hear it?”

Graeme tried a couple chords, tuned the low E string, tweaked the magic a little, and nodded Imani’s way. It was not so much that he consciously decided to show off as that he wanted to make Sal feel stupid for doubting him, not that he even had concrete proof Sal had doubted him. Anyway, it didn't work very well because the first time Sal stumbled — not his fault, given he'd never heard this version of the song before — Graeme lost his own rhythm and threw everything off so that Imani had to call a halt to the whole song.

“Again?”

“Sure.”

This time Graeme fucked it up all by himself. It was in the way the magic had to shift in the bridge, which had been so incredibly easy six hours ago that he hadn’t even had to think about it. It hadn't been this difficult when it was just the three of them, Graeme thought despairingly. Imani stopped them again. “You okay?”

“Yeah, of course — sorry. We can try again.”

The third time they managed to play it all the way through to the end, but that was really all that could be said for it. It sounded like four people who barely knew each other playing the song off the sheet music. Not like three of the best wizarding musicians of the ‘80s plus Graeme bringing about the kind of sonic eschaton that could vengefully melt Mitzi Love’s face.

I’m not on these people’s level, Graeme thought, watching Imani and Flora exchange another confoundingly incomprehensible glance.

“Maybe one more time?” said Imani thoughtfully.

When they made it upstairs again after a few hours of stilted, difficult rehearsal during which Graeme’s every mistake, even the unnoticeable ones, felt like another log on the pyre of his self-esteem, it was dark outside. Flora went straight to the fridge and plucked a paper menu out from under a touristy magnet from some place called Umbria. “Gonna call for Indian takeaway,” she said. “Mani, the usual?”

“You bet.”

“Sal?”

“Paneer masala?”

“Good on you, they make the best. Graeme?”

“No thanks,” Graeme said, not even really sure why he was saying this, but unable to bear the thought of sitting around this house being ignored by the three of them for another minute longer. “I’m gonna go out for a walk.”

“You want us to get you something for when you get back?”

“No — no worries. Thanks. I’ll, um, see you soon.”

The plan was just to go to the local. There was a nice one in a mews by Butterfield Green that he had gone to with Flora. He went in and had a double gin and tonic but the place was full of football fans yelling at the TV, so he went out again and walked all the way to Finsbury Park, by which time it was dark, and the streetlight was glowing in the corners of the sky, and the wind was bitter cold. He walked around the park and down the Lordship Road between the reservoirs, deep black pools refracting the golden light of the city back into the glowing sky, and back into the mazelike tangle of streets in Shacklewell, where he wandered around aimlessly for half an hour before giving up and heading to the nearest pub. Whatever football game had been happening earlier was over and it must have gone badly because there were a lot of people hunched dejectedly over dark beers in dark corners. He ordered another double gin and tonic and stood in the front window, watching the people go by, hunched together against the cold. Then he wondered why anybody, especially himself, had ever assumed he could do this.

No, seriously. Clearly he had let his ambition get ahead of reality. He was twenty-two years old. He’d played in one single band before, which he had had to be aggressively talked into joining, with people he had known for years, and they had recorded a single album and played a couple dozen shows to a bunch of like-minded Northwest weirdos. And then Wray had fucking died. And then Alex and Lockett had basically propped him up with supports from the back like a bombed-out relic. And then he had, well, to say the least, not exactly paid them back very kindly for all their trouble.

How was it that everything kept coming back to this? When he surfaced from the totality of that thought, the gin and tonic was gone, so he went and got another one. For a minute he watched the bubbles effervesce against the ice.

Wray would have said what Wray had always said. He would have reached across the table in whatever seedy bar on the Ave or Pine Street and wrapped his hand around Graeme’s wrist and he would have said, _You're such a Capricorn. Listen, you can’t quit, I need you. Nobody plays like you. You’re the best._

\--

“Where did you find that kid,” Sal said, trying for casual, dragging the last of the garlic naan through the last drops of bright orange masala in the plastic takeout container.

“Seattle,” said Imani with her mouth full.

Flora was watching him with the kind of hovering eyebrows that meant she could hardly wait to hear whatever he had to say next.

“I think he’s kind of nervous,” Sal said generously.

Imani smirked. “Aren’t we all?”

Sal shrugged. “Not too late to find an actual professional,” he said.

Flora guffawed. “What happened to Mr. DIY ’til I die?”

“Sal, darling,” Imani said, “I think you’ll find that the divorce has made us both something of personas non grata.”

“What divorce?”

“With the Boardman-Childermass psychosexual trainwreck conglomerate, and, consequently, with Amortentia Records,” Flora explained. “But seriously, Sal, if we wanted somebody who played like Jimmy Page we could get them, if we really wanted to.”

“We just thought that would be incredibly boring,” Imani said.

Sal hated that she was right, but he was still unconvinced. “Right,” he said.

Flora leaned back in her chair, tipping the front feet off the floor. She gave Imani a look that must just have been _I defer the remainder of this argument to you_ , because, immediately upon receiving it, Imani said, “He'll get there, Sal.”

“How do you know?”

“We all got there,” Flora said. She took a luxurious sip of her beer and gave Sal a wink. “How about you do the dishes, Mr. Houseguest.”

\--

Sal was staying with a friend over near Highbury Square, and on Wednesday he called the house and asked Graeme to meet him in the early evening at a pub on the Brownswood Road. Graeme left about an hour early to walk over, as part of his ongoing attempt to learn the city enough to not get lost every time he put a foot out the door. The air was crisp and cool and it rained enough and sideways to feel like a bigger, older version of Seattle, sometimes, except for its very closeness and disorienting flatness. The flatness was the excuse he'd started giving for being late all the time, and so it was what he told Sal when he showed up at a quarter past the hour out of breath from half-running up and down the street for the last twenty minutes. Sal was sitting at a corner table with a Guinness, reading James Joyce. He looked up when Graeme came in the door, but his expression was illegible. “Sal,” Graeme said, shrugging out of his coat, “I’m so sorry, it's just — my sense of direction sucks here — ”

“Don't worry about it. Get yourself something and put it on my tab.”

At the bar, Graeme carefully restrained himself from ordering something unwise and went the route he typically went when he was trying to make himself seem like a person with a normal relationship with alcohol, which was ordering a shot of whiskey and a beer. The bartender poured the shot first and he swallowed it while her back was turned, then accepted the dripping glass from her hand. Back at the table, Sal had immersed himself in _Ulysses_ again. When Graeme sat down, he carefully folded his page over and tucked the paperback in his coat pocket. Then, mystifyingly, he said, “Tell me about yourself.”

“What? Me?”

Sal took a sip from his pint glass and then smudged foam from his mustache. “I think we maybe got off on the wrong foot.”

Graeme had been thinking this. “Did we?”

Sal just grinned. “I don’t know anything about you except you're six foot three or something and you come from Seattle, and you don’t know anything about me, and now we're supposed to play in this group and tour the world together and I figure we might as well try to be friends.”

“I know you’re Irish and you played in Crushing Valerian,” Graeme said.

“Don't you think there's more to both of us than these vagaries?”

“Maybe the details aren’t that edifying.”

“Whose are? Where’d you learn to play guitar?”

“I taught myself in my room at school out of _Total Magical Melody_.”

“Ah, good old _T.M.M._ ”

“Where'd you learn to play drums?”

“I was thirteen in Dublin and the only thing to do was start a hardcore band even though none of us could play any instruments,” Sal said. “Drums seemed the easiest.”

“I don't know if that's true,” said Graeme.

“It isn’t. Bass is the easiest.”

Graeme laughed. “You don’t actually have to be good or anything to be in a band that sounds good,” he said.

“Don’t I know it. Why guitar?”

“My dad had one in the garage. It was just lying around, you know.” It had looked very lonely, and so was he in those days before he went to Seattle to board at Denny.

“I probably don’t have to tell you that you’re very talented.”

“Sal,” Graeme started. “People are always telling me that but — ”

“But what?”

“I don't even play the best of my friends at home. But then I think — if I wasn’t always trying to be better than I wouldn’t be any good at all.”

“You don’t sound insecure when you play.”

“I’m not insecure when I play. I’m only insecure all the rest of the time.”

The more they talked and drank, the easier it got. “Is C.V. still together?” Graeme asked after a while.

“Cam and I never — well, we always say whatever we recorded most recently is the last C.V. release. And then I go over his and we have a joint and next thing, you know, waking up in the morning hungover as sin, there’ll be six hours of new material.”

“I remember listening to _The Witch of Endor_ live tape when I was fifteen and having nightmares for a week.”

Sal gave him a funny crooked smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Here’s an industry secret. That music — ” He put air-quotes around the word with beringed fingers — “is based on the time Cam and I attempted to do necromancy.”

Graeme felt a chill not entirely of his body. Maybe this was a cultural difference between the U.K. and the States: At home, you weren't supposed to say that word in polite company. You were definitely not supposed to ask what Graeme did next, which was, “Did it work?”

Sal shrugged. “Not really.”

“Isn’t that Dark magic?”

Sal shrugged again. “Not necessarily,” he said.

Maybe this was _the other thing_ Imani and Flora had referred to when they’d mentioned that Amortentia had forbidden them from hiring Sal, Graeme thought.

“Can I tell you something,” Sal asked. "You can take it with a couple grains of salt.”

“Anything.”

Sal sank a little deeper in his chair and took a long sip of his Guinness. “I’m thirty years old. Right? Older than the girls. Older than you. Not as old as the Weird Sisters, but pretty old for a professional musician. Here’s one thing I've learned about — life, I suppose. Magic, music, life and death, love, sex, all of it. Nothing’s ever as black and white as it seems. Nothing would ever be any fun if it fit into little boxes, would it?”

“I get it, Sal, really I do, but, raising the dead?”

Sal's eyebrow cocked along with the corner of his mouth. “Who would I be if I let the posh old blood purists have all the most fun parts of magical history? You never wanted to do something just because someone told you you couldn’t?”

“Sal — ” they were both of them laughing now — “but raising the dead?”

“It was the only time we ever tried it,” Sal confessed. “And they had to call in the MLE. We were about fifteen ourselves. I was pretty much grounded until I moved out.”

“What about Cam?”

“Oh, Cam’s mum was one of those old Muggle witches. She gave us the books! She was just pissed we didn't bring her with us.”

Graeme thought of Wray’s mom, and how the worst thing they’d ever done as kids was sneak into Muggle punk shows and get drunk on the worst beer imaginable.

Sal drained the last drop of his Guinness. “Get us another?”

“Alright.”

“And something for yourself. You can buy the drinks next time we go out.”

Up at the bar Graeme did the shot and beer trick again. It turned out drinking was awfully easy when nobody around you was looking for you doing it all the time and then gazing at you sadly in the corner of their eye. Back at the table, they clinked glasses, and then Sal said, “Are you seeing anybody?”

“You mean like — ”

“You have a girlfriend at home or something?”

“No. You?”

Sal raised a wobbly hand to indicate _kind of_. “You’ll meet Moira,” he said.

“And?”

“Moira isn’t… well. You’ll see. You ever been single on tour before?”

“Well, my band at home, we never really toured beyond a couple days in the van to Boise or Portland, you know? We were going to but… anyway, I guess we went to Arcata once. So, no, I mean, I’ve barely even been on tour.”

“Just keep your head about you,” Sal said. “What’s your band called? Somebody was talking about this Seattle band… besides Nirvana, I mean…”

“Terrormancy?”

“What?”

“Was it Terrormancy?”

“I don't think so. Is that — ”

“No, my friends' band. The best band from Seattle in, in my lifetime, I think.”

Sal, charmingly, took a little notepad out from the pocket of his jacket which also held the _Ulysses_ paperback and carefully wrote down in a very artistic hand the name of Lockett and Montclair's first band.

“I play in this group called Crucia,” Graeme said.

“You’re in Crucia!”

“Yeah — wait, you didn't — ”

Sal leaned back against the hardwood paneling, grinning. “Everything makes so much sense now.”

“You heard our record?”

“It’s all anybody in Dublin talks about.”

“Wait — really?”

“Are you going to make another one?”

Graeme shrugged. “Alex and I have the songs. It just — you know. Wray, I mean, you know he died.”

“It says it on his picture inside the gatefold,” Sal reminded him.

“It feels — well, there’s an, emotional hurdle, I guess, or something, I don’t know.”

Sal nodded slowly. “It’s just unmooring when a young person dies.”

“He was my best friend.” That funny thing was happening where it was easier to talk about some things with a person you barely knew. “It's been, like, eighteen months or something. And, I don't know. Grief is… a whole other level.”

“It’s in how you play,” Sal told him. “The way you did the riff on ‘The Undertaker’…”

That was Flora's grief song. It was probably about some kind of inter-Hobgoblins personal drama about which Graeme could only speculate. The riff had formed in his mind upon first listen to the test pressing and then he had worked on it for a day or so while he was sick in order to find the magic that made it feel like it hurt badly enough to be real. The end product was like Slint’s “Don Aman” in hell. “It’s the only way I can stand to touch it,” he told Sal. “Does that make sense?”

Sal shrugged. “Hardly anything does. Not when it comes to feelings that big. I always figured that was why noise existed.”

Graeme couldn't help but smile. “Now I get why you wanted to do this.”

“How do you mean?”

“We really have a lot in common when you get down to it.”

“Exactly!”

It was just after sunset when they left together, sharing a cigarette toward the dim edge of a circle of pale streetlight, shaking hands like business associates, parting ways. Maybe it was the couple drinks, Graeme thought, digging his nose into his scarf, following the end of the light across Clissold Park, but this was starting to feel like perhaps it would be okay. The sunset glowed rosy gold in the eaves and shutters of the brick townhouses. It would be fine to get lost, he thought; if he got lost he might find something, and he would make his way home in the end. This was just a city like any other in an episode like any other in his strange and miraculous life. Somewhere somebody was listening to “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” and somewhere one of those unfamiliar sirens was going and somewhere somebody else leant hard on their car horn, which here was called a klaxon. All the symphonic complexity of sound unraveled and knit back together inside his mind into a tapestry of new colors vivid enough in his mind’s eye to almost be seen transposed across the real world like a hallucinatory curtain, so that at first the sound of somebody calling his name from his coat pocket felt like some strange new accent bleeding in from the corner of the brilliant aurora. When he at last realized what was going on, he was obliged to throw himself into the alley behind a pub, heart in his throat, in order to remove the two-way mirror from his pocket without breaking numerous international standards of magical secrecy. In place of his own reflection was a face he wanted to see somehow simultaneously more and less than any other face in this world.

“Hey,” said Lockett, not quite meeting his eyes. He was sitting at the kitchen table in the trailer in Riggins in the wavering halo of the hanging bare lightbulb. “What's up?”

\--

“Mani.”

Imani turned over on her back. Flora was staring at the ceiling in the blue moonlight. “What’s wrong?”

“Tell me again that we're not making a huge mistake.”

“We’re not making a huge mistake,” said Imani.

Flora scooted and wiggled so that her ear was against the squishy part between Imani’s shoulder and clavicle. Imani wrapped her arms around her and mentally listed all the things she could say. The record is good. Have you heard the songs? Have you heard us play them? Have you heard Sal and Graeme play them? They’ll get over their stupid jealous boy thing as soon as they get drunk together and then we’ll be in the pink, in the black, and in the red, baby…

“We’re not making a huge mistake,” Imani said again. “In fact, compared to joining the Hobgoblins in the first place, this is probably brilliant and highly advisable.”

That made Flora laugh. She was warm, and she needed a haircut. Somehow, through the smog, the moon was moving on the floor, and outside the window on the high street somebody drove by playing “I Wanna Be Adored.”

“If you don’t want to go on tour again,” Imani said, “we don’t have to.”

“But we booked the shows at D&R.”

“We don’t have to book any more.” Imani shrugged. “We could take the hit, rent this place out, go back to subsisting on ramen noodles.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No.” She kissed the bridge of Flora’s nose. “And we could have the same argument we’ve had ninety thousand times, or we could go to sleep.”

\--

Back at the flat on Highbury Hill, behind the Arsenal stadium, Moira was painting her toenails, watching Muggle MTV (playing Blur’s “Bang” video for possibly the thirtieth time that day) on mute, and yelling into the phone, presumably at Sean. To wit, once Sal had made himself a cup of tea and started the dishwasher, MTV was on to the new Throwing Muses video, and Moira, having hung up the phone, said, “Sean says hello.”

“How's he doing.”

“Bored.”

Moira was too, Sal could tell. Moira’s default state of being was bored. It, like many other things about Moira, made it next to impossible to be in love with her all the time and yet Sal was anyway, somehow, and had been for like ten years.

“How was your night,” Moira said.

“It was alright.”

She smiled, pressing her tongue against her front teeth. The left one was chipped from one particular instance of shoving her microphone into her face back home in the clubs in the Liberties. “So it worked,” she said.

“I think it did,” said Sal. “He’s an alright kid, I guess. He’s in a bit over his head. And he drinks too much.”

Moira’s eyebrow lifted and Sal sensed she might say something like _So do you_ , which was probably true, but instead she finished applying venom-green lacquer to her left pinky toe. "Want me to do yours?”

“Sure.”

Sal put his bare feet in Moira's lap. MTV moved on to Jane’s Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing." Sometimes it felt like they were an old married couple and sometimes it felt like putting your arm into the bear enclosure at the zoo. But, Sal figured, closing his eyes, if love could be confined to a little box it wouldn’t be love at all…

\---

\--

-


	2. 2.

**2.**

**April 1992**

Just about the minute Imani’s brother's friend’s uncle handed over the keys to the little flat on Malvern Road in Hackney, Graeme sat down in the middle of the bare hardwood floor in the bedroom and called Lockett’s name into the two-way mirror.

Since Lockett had called him in the end of February, they had done this once a week or so. They had not discussed the elephant in the room, which was somehow simultaneously a monumental relief and a source of constantly needling guilt. They had come close once, when Graeme had been feeling sorry for himself and thought he should probably attempt to apologize and explain himself to the best of his ability, and he could tell even from thousands of miles away through the tiny mirror square that Lockett could read it on his face, the imminent lifting of the veil of truth, because his eyes got big and he promptly changed the subject to some inane bullshit. After that call, Graeme had gone out to the pub in the mews and sat at the corner table until he almost fell asleep, thinking about how he knew Lockett's face so well and Lockett knew his face so well and yet somehow that didn't mean they understood one another… Anyway, it was shortly after that, and the subsequent morning of extreme hangover, that Imani said, as they washed the tea dishes together elbow-deep in suds at the sink before the front window, “You know, I have this family friend who rents out a spare apartment…”

Things were a little different these days now that the album release was imminent. In March, Imani had called up an old journalist frenemy who was a staff writer at _T.M.M._ , and the subsequent interview ended in a six-page cover story introducing Saint Rose, announcing the debut LP _Severe Asceticism_ and the August residency at Dyatlov & Roswell _,_ and featuring a mind-boggling array of out-of-context pull-quotes that wound up in side columns in the _Prophet_ and the dread _Wizarding Rock Weekly_ , the local music tabloid that Imani, Flora, and Sal said they hated but read cover to cover every week.

The _T.M.M._ cover story had necessitated a photoshoot, which was something neither Graeme nor Sal was used to. Crucia had only ever done two — one for the first time they were in _Smoke and Mirrors_ and one of the newly bereaved four-piece around the time the album came out, at the behest of Sub Sub Pop — and Crushing Valerian had spent their whole career compounding their occultist reputation by enforcing strict anonymity. To wit, as a longtime fan of the project, Graeme had never seen Sal's face before meeting him at Euston in February. Imani had wanted to go to Swarkestone Pavilion “for the Stones vibes” but had been vetoed by Flora, who had said something like, “but do you really want Stones vibes, darling?” They had ended up driving to Margate, which Graeme only knew from the T.S. Eliot poem, and shooting in the creepy old arcade at dusk. On the way there, Imani had turned around to Graeme and Sal in the backseat and said, “Don't let them dress you in anything ridiculous.”

“Of course, mom,” said Sal.

In the new apartment, in the early afternoon sun, Graeme looked into the dark mirror, and waited. It didn't take Lockett very long. He looked tired but he smiled gamely in the way that changed the shape of his face into something pleasant to look at. “Morning,” he said. “Look what I got.”

He angled the mirror toward the table to show Graeme his copy of _T.M.M._ In the picture on the cover, the photographer had artfully arranged the four of them against the angry sky and the dusk-muted fluorescent hues of a ticket-taking console that said _PLEASURE CENTER_. Imani had done her hair as big as it would go and had refused to let any of the stylists come near it with a ten-foot pole. She wore a long floral sundress, oversize sweater slipping off her shoulder, and her yellow Doc Martens. Flora was in overalls, a black turtleneck, heaps of costume jewelry, and conjunctivitis-inducing quantities of eye makeup. In his scuffed leather jacket and sunglasses, to the girls' right, Sal had turned his face so that it could not quite be fully captured by the camera. Graeme was sitting on the ground to Flora and Imani’s left, leant back on the heels of his hands. He hadn’t let them dress him in anything crazy — he had worn his old threadbare Kelpies shirt and Levis and a cranberry cardigan from Flora’s closet — but they had made his hair look extra floppy. “You look like Chris Cornell,” Lockett said. “But they did get your name wrong.”

“Here everybody is a G-R-A-H-A-M,” Graeme explained. “And they give it two syllables.”

“Honestly one of my biggest regrets is not buying one of those Kelpies shirts,” Lockett said, resting the mirror up against the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and collapsing back in one of the rickety old chairs. He had this plaid flannel robe that Graeme had never seen in person before that must have belonged to one of his parents, and it seemed that he wore it every morning, or at least every morning that they spoke on the two-way mirror. “They ripped so hard.”

“It’s falling apart but I’ll never get rid of it,” Graeme agreed. “You want to see my new apartment?”

It was just the tiny kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Grimy windows spilling golden light. Graeme had propped Wray's old off-white guitar in the corner of the bedroom — his own was at Imani and Flora's place — and Sal had given him a bottle of champagne, but other than that the walls were bare and the floor was featureless except for his backpack, overflowing clothes across the bedroom floor.

“It’s nice," Lockett said, though it was unclear if he had actually been able to see anything.

“It’s not much.”

“Take it from me,” Lockett said. “It’s nice to have your own place.”

Graeme sat up on the kitchen counter and propped the mirror against the teakettle — it had come with the place, like the stove and the telephone, likely due to its equivalent necessity in the daily lives of Londoners. It was kind of funny to look into a mirror and not see yourself. Seeing Lockett's face instead felt like a kind of cosmic riddle. They were separated by six hours and a quarter of the planet and yet they could look in the mirror and see one another instead of themselves. He wondered what he looked like from Lockett's end. It was warm in the apartment and the light coming in through the window above the sink against his back was cool and clear…

“How’s Idaho,” he said.

Lockett shrugged. “Quiet. The neighbors are starting to get to know me and ask if I want to go fishing.”

It was unclear if he considered this a tremendous insult or a sign of respect. “You ever go home to Seattle?” Graeme asked.

“Sometimes.” A crooked something, not quite a smile, played around his lips. “Everybody asks me about you.”

This was vaguely disconcerting. “You could tell them I said screw it all and got a job on a logging crew or… an Alaskan crab boat or something.”

Lockett laughed his scary laugh. “I could until you were on the fucking cover of _Total Magical Melody_.”

“That’s my doppelgänger, like on _Twin Peaks_. In every realm but the physical… I’m on an Alaskan crab boat right now.”

“So are you ever coming back?”

Graeme was surprised by the question and by the casualness with which Lockett asked it. “Of course I am,” he said, before he could really think about it. “Of course I am! I just, you know, I signed the contract, and I have to — and I like it here, but. Of course I’m coming home.”

Lockett evaluated him from thousands of miles away and simultaneously from inside his mind and very soul. “Okay,” he said, picking the skin around his fingernail. He sounded like he wasn’t sure he even believed Graeme in the first place. “Good.”

“The rain’s different here,” Graeme told him. “It doesn’t always feel right, you know.”

“I don't know. But I can imagine, I guess.”

“You’d like it here if you ever wanted to visit,” Graeme said. “The city’s so old. It feels so heavy, sometimes, walking around, all the history. And the people are… not so different from people in Seattle, I guess. Kind of cold until you get under their skin.”

“Have you met a lot of people,” Lockett asked.

“Not a ton. Folks from the label, regulars at the pub…”

“The pub.”

“I’ve been trying not to drink alone,” Graeme lied.

“Good for you.” This was dangerously close to the elephant. It was looming over Graeme's shoulder breathing down his neck. He braced himself for whatever was coming next, which was somehow worse: “Well,” Lockett said, “are you seeing anybody?”

Graeme could not contain his eyebrows from jumping up his face. They’d never talked about anything like this before, that he remembered. Clearly something had opened the can of dread worms, and the worms were even more appalling than the usual canned worms. “What?” he managed. “No.”

Lockett was bright red. Graeme knew he probably was too. “Just asking,” Lockett said.

Graeme bit his lip on, It's not any of your business. That wasn't technically true anyway.

“I have to ask if you're being safe,” Lockett went on, with a tone that suggested he was being held at gunpoint.

“What!”

“You know what I mean?”

“Of course I know what you — yes, mother, of course I’m _being safe_.”

Lockett chewed his lower lip. “Fine,” he said.

“Lockett, what do you want me to say. I always use condoms.”

Lockett chewed his lower lip even harder so that when he let go of it to speak Graeme could see even through the mirror that it was bruisey red. A shiver circled his spine. “I just know you, Graeme,” Lockett said.

He was so good at leveling something devastating in a single sentence. He didn’t even know he was doing it. “Right,” Graeme said.

There was no point in attempting a real conversation after that. They said awkward goodbyes. Graeme went for a walk on the high street in attempt to find a charity shop that had secondhand furniture, but, after not so very long, mission thoroughly unaccomplished, he went to the pub on the corner, which he had already scouted and evaluated before he agreed to move into the apartment. He sat in the back corner of the bar, and it was slow until after dark, so that the bartender kept coming around to shoot the shit. She was maybe ten years older than him and tattooed like a biker with rockabilly hair and makeup and leather pants, and she always had the blues on the turntable. Today was Buddy Guy's “Five Long Years.” Maybe he had moved to this neighborhood because he was actually in love with her, he started thinking in the vicinity of shot number four.

“What’s wrong with you,” she said, coming over to pour him shot number six.

“Just — awkward conversation, with, um, a friend.”

“About what?”

 _That I obviously have feelings for him, in the most roundabout way possible._ “Just — stupid — it doesn’t matter now.”

“Except that it clearly does.”

He met her eyes. From the corner of her well-sculpted eyebrow a golden ring glinted. “Isn’t the point of coming to the pub to forget all about it?”

She smirked. "Sometimes people want to talk,” she said. “I guess you don’t.”

\--

Lockett took his neighbor up on the invitation to go fishing, and once he had located his father's old moldy chest waders from the back of the closet they walked together down the forest service road to Shorts Bar. It was the kind of day that made you believe everything the poets and lovers had ever said about spring. His neighbor, an old trucker who hilariously went by Butch, had been friendly with Jane Schaff, so Lockett lied about having been kicked out by his parents and told Butch he’d gone away to boarding school. Maybe the lie was incredibly obvious, because after that Butch’s brow was tied up and he seemed lost in thought.

They went out into the river just up to their knees because the current was so strong. It took a little while to get the fly fishing muscle memory back, but then it was like conducting an orchestra. The trick was making the tied fly dance on the water the way real insects did. After a while you could really hypnotize yourself, doing it. The world condensed to the movement upon the water. The bare, featureless mountains rolling out of the morning and the river rolling out of the mountains…

Fourteen years old, the summer he didn’t even have a pair of shoes, standing in the water, watching the waxing moon crest the corner of the valley, longing, alone. Sometimes back then he hadn’t spoken for many days. They survived on shoplifted cans of Campbells soup, which they shrunk with magic and tucked in their coat pockets. Sometimes he sat by the river and played guitar. When he was young sometimes it had seemed like a great adventure until it didn’t.

“What’s on your mind, kiddo,” Butch called over the burbling drone of the water, the wind in the canyon.

Lockett hauled his mind out of the memory hole. Sometimes he felt like it was the smartest thing he'd ever done to move back here and other times just about the exact opposite. “Just haven't done this in a long time,” he said.

“Well, you’re a natural!”

They wound up with three trout between them, which they packed up in Butch’s cooler for the walk home. “Come around for a cup of coffee sometime,” Butch said, handing over Lockett's fish on the threshold of the Schaff trailer. “Meet the missus.”

Lockett had absolutely no intention of doing this. Or, wait, did he? “Sounds great,” he heard himself say, shaking Butch’s hand.

Inside he put the radio on — it was halfway through “Come As You Are” — and put the fish corpse in the sink and found the sharpest knife and set about doing all the disgusting particulars. It had also been a long time since he had done this, but it had gotten to be second nature, working at the cannery, clawing handfuls of guts out of salmon as long as his arm. With the back of the knife he scraped off the deep fluorescing scales — they looked like pale chips of mica in the sink — then took the fins off, and made a long, shallow cut from tail to gills. The flesh inside was translucent white-blue and the organs in their little fold beneath the spine were like a nest of bright and strange jewels. Carefully he sunk two fingers into the cool, damp cavity to detach the strand of organs at the head.

The trouble was that they were such different people. Lockett couldn’t even begin to fathom that thing that Graeme did — that he'd seen Graeme do! that Graeme had tried with him! — which was to flay his chest cavity open and invite just about anybody to test the waters of the great hulking emptiness. For all of the suffocating need to be loved, which could be kind of intoxicating when you were in his presence, or even, apparently, when you were looking at his face from thousands of miles away through a three-inch metal square, he certainly tended to act recklessly. Like he wanted to get hurt. Or worse.

Lockett coaxed the ropy, bright string of organs out into the sink and swiped his fingers through the cavity again in search of the fish's kidney. What right did he have to be upset with somebody else for needing to be touched? Was it just the utter confounding noncomprehension that somebody else could need so badly something that he himself didn't need at all? He didn't need it at all, right? Besides, there was nothing he could do about it. He was thousands of miles away and anyway — he just couldn’t. Not eight weeks ago, Graeme had pretty clearly gotten the point across that he didn't need Lockett’s help, with this or anything, and that he intended to go on living like the grief was terminal. He should have taken the fucking hint; instead he had taken the second two-way mirror.So, consequently, it was safe to say that he had brought upon himself any kind of psycho-spiritual torment arising from the thought of Graeme — his friend! — being with someone else, being touched by someone else, being in bed with someone else…

By the time he had the fish fully cleaned and filleted he was clenching his jaw so tightly his teeth hurt. He went outside and sat on the rotting stoop in the thawing sunshine, where he went through two cigarettes quickly enough to feel lightheaded before he realized the feeling was jealousy.

\--

The light was cool and clear. The bed was warm and strange. And the shadow moving slowly like a dancer against the far wall belonged to a big green plant hung in a funny little macrame sling in the window. The window, outside which were a number of strange long boats moored in a motionless canal: the still water at first seeming to refract the deep gray sky as faultlessly as a mirror. 

In short this was not Graeme's apartment. The events of the previous evening developed like a polaroid photograph as he got up and dressed so that it was really not all that surprising to go into the kitchen and find the bartender from the pub on the corner, in a floral silk robe and bunny slippers, smoking a sizeable joint as she fried some eggs. 

"What time is it," Graeme asked her.

"Good morning to you too." She pointed to the clock above the bedroom door. "Half past eleven." 

He was supposed to be in Shacklewell by noon for rehearsal, a fact that he had conveniently and temporarily forgotten somewhere in the course of the customary self-negating ritual. "Oh, fuck, really?" 

She looked like she'd have a good laugh as soon as he left. "You got somewhere to be?" 

"Unfortunately," Graeme lied. One of his shoes was by the door… god only knew where the other one was. 

"No time for an egg?" 

"No — sorry, maybe some other time, but do you mind if I have a hit of that?" 

The bartender evidently did not. She passed the joint his way and when their fingers brushed absolutely nothing happened. 

"Your other shoe's in the bathroom," she said.

"Why's it in there?" 

She shrugged. "I figured you might know." 

There was a condom wrapper in the little trash can beside the toilet. _Thank god_. He splashed his face with cold water. There was nothing to be done about his hair. His shoe was in the bathtub. 

Back in the kitchen he wrestled into his inside-out jacket. "How do I get back to London Fields?" 

"Left out of here will take you to Mare Street." 

That sounded vaguely familiar. "Right," Graeme said, "well, see you." 

"You take care of yourself, now." 

It was hard to tell sometimes if people were just saying that or if they really meant it, Graeme figured, hunching his shoulders against the cool spring breeze as he headed off down the road. Either option was sort of emotionally embarrassing. But the trick was not to think about British people’s confusing surface-level etiquette and focus on figuring out where the fuck you were, in this piled-on city that made zero objective sense.

It was a minor miracle that he found the right bus within twenty minutes. His clothes smelled like an ashtray, the shoe that had been in the tub was slightly damp, and the bartender's weed had been surprisingly potent, so that at first he felt a moment of disembodied terror when something inside his head seemed to turn over like oil and water and the lightness floated and the warm heavy wool blanket pressed every bad feeling down into a low and soothing hum… The bus went up Landsdowne, past the park, where the buds were just starting to come out on the trees and the grass under the warming gray sky seemed very soft and green, as though it had been put on earth solely for purposes of digging your bare toes into. There were some kids in bright football jerseys tossing a Frisbee around on the rolling lawn and the movement of the tiny fluorescent disc against the dew-dark trees made reality briefly seem like a stop-motion film that was rapidly collapsing. The bus stopped and a woman in a green niqab ushered two little kids in front of her down the narrow aisle until they piled into the seat across from Graeme, kids leaning eagerly up against mom, watching intently at the rain-smeared window as the gray-brown rowhouses faded into pubs and restaurants and charity shops and health food stores and bakeries and druggists.

At the crossroads in Dalston they waited in traffic next to someone blasting Slick Rick. A woman in a red dress carried a bouquet of flowers that concealed her face. A cadre of cackling punks in leather with bright mohawks and safety pin jewelry jaywalked through traffic like time travelers from a Sex Pistols gig. He was so stonedly absorbed in people- and city-watching that he missed his stop and had to run, feeling like an injured bird, down from the Walford Road, past a mosque and a synagogue letting worshippers out after services, past the tennis courts and the playground on the green, smelling spring, fried food, exhaust, coffee, Saturday, and up Imani and Flora's street as the sun slipped from behind a veil of clouds and set all the wide windows in the fraternally twinned rowhouses delightfully, blindingly ablaze for a split second in which he stopped in his tracks, breathing hard, thinking perhaps he was the only living human being on earth ever to see something so surprisingly, strangely beautiful…

The milk truck rumbled up the cobbles. He was twenty minutes late, so he let himself in, chugged an entire pint glass of water directly from the sink, and headed down into the basement, where Flora and Sal and Imani — the latter strumming Graeme’s guitar gingerly in her lap, like it was hot or sharp or something — were running some of the complicated drum and bass phrasing from “Sound and Fury.” Sal noticed him on the stairs and sent the drums tumbling down.

“Sorry I’m late,” Graeme said, taking off his jacket, throwing it in the corner, and accepting his guitar from Imani. He could feel the deep golden gesture of her magic inside it, maybe just because of the weed. “Overslept.”

Sal’s illustrious eyebrow cocked up his forehead. “So I take it you found a bed.”

He had also conveniently forgotten that he was going to have to buy one after this if he didn't want to sleep on the floor. “Oh, um, yeah, I did, thanks.” He scrubbed a hand over his burning face. “What are we playing?”

“Working on the trouble bit of S. and F.,” Imani said, setting up her keyboards. “We can run it from the top.”

This was the album closer, a fucked bulldozer running rampant and roughshod for a full seven minutes. Or, seven minutes on the album. In rehearsal, in the sweaty soundproofed basement, the four of them had been known to play it for a full quarter hour. It was Flora’s song, so she was a little less protective than Imani about what the band did with it — a mixed blessing, because they had come up with all these complicated tempo changes that were going to be difficult to pull off live. It was Graeme’s favorite song from _Severe Asceticism_ , so when he’d said “We don’t have to do all that if it’s too much,” he’d been lying. Thankfully, Flora had given him a funny look and said, “Of course we do.”

It started with a kind of classically Flora St. Jamesian creepy-sexy bassline and isolated, reverberating vocal before the drums crashed in like an unwelcome houseguest and Graeme and Imani sent a wash of wailing feedback through the melee. The lyrics were tailor-made for kids in the front row to scream along and sometimes Graeme found himself singing them under his breath:

 _If the weight is more than I can carry  
_ _I turn into the sound and fury…_

It was basically a three-minute pop song buried under eons of mudslide wreckage until it turned into a petrified diamond. Then they collapsed it into a speedy motorik jam that sometimes collapsed again and again and again through various tempos and keys into an elastic sludge. Usually they came up from it smiling at each other, as though they’d just handily won some kind of exhausting game. Other times they stumbled over the time signatures and landed in a messy heap in a kind of musical no-man’s land. Their first run-through wasn't so good, but they did three more that landed like a decent gymnast, by which time it was nearly two in the afternoon and everybody’s stomach was rumbling. Sal went out to the high street and came back with coffee and a pizza. They exchanged the rote gossip and politics talk at the kitchen table, and finally Imani pointed out the hickey under Graeme's collar which he had not yet himself noticed. “Did you run into a vampire last night?”

“Yeah, it came with the bed, I guess…”

They brought a six-pack of light Belgian beer down into the basement with them just after three and set the last two under a cooling charm in the corner. “Maybe we run through the set,” Sal said, trying to be casual about it. They hadn’t yet tried this. “Do the whole album top to bottom.”

Imani and Flora exchanged a meaningful look. With nothing else to do, Sal and Graeme exchanged one too. Sal had pointed out, in their most recent trip to the pub together, that sometimes it really did feel like they were George and Ringo. They’d then had a twenty minute argument over whether Imani or Flora was John or Paul, which was silly because obviously (Graeme had claimed) Imani was John. "That's ridiculous,” Sal had half-shouted, grinning delightedly, over the bar noise. “Imani is clearly Paul.”

She peeked out over Flora's shoulder then. “Graeme?”

He felt remarkably sure. “I can do it.”

“Right then.” Imani shifted her weight in her house slippers. Her yellow toenail polish was chipping. “Top to bottom?”

“Aye,” said Sal, cracking the snare.

And so they did, starting with “The Girls, Part II,” through another run of “Sound and Fury,” with thirty-second pauses in between each track for tuning, shifting pedals, tightening drum heads, sipping beers, mentally altering the intricate magic on each instrument. It was probably good that they were doing this now, Graeme thought, so that he could start figuring out what kind of sound spells were actually going to be possible to switch between quickly while they were performing live. “The Girls” had the feel of one of Kim Deal’s songs for the Pixies or the Breeders: a dancing bassline carried the melody through a thicket of guitars, supplemented by Sal hitting the drums — and plenty of crash cymbal — as hard as he could. There was "The Undertaker,” a ballad on the record that they'd turned into a harrowing dirge, and “I Was Also,” Imani and Flora’s big co-written in-lieu-of-therapy meditation on their previous band, cleverly but barely disguised as a roaring, vengeful breakup number. Then “Feast Day,” which they'd gotten down to a mad science: fluorescent liquid bubbling, reacting whenever you touched it.

“What time is it,” Imani asked Sal when the last of the feedback had evaporated at the end of “Sound and Fury.”

Sal checked his watch. There was sweat in his hair. “Four-thirty,” he said.

“So it’s like an hour, hour and fifteen…”

Graeme took a deep breath and felt his heart skip. Crucia usually played for about thirty minutes. A less-skilled wizard may have found playing with that much sound magic for extended periods brutally exhausting, and even Graeme felt pretty winded. He went for the two remaining beers in the corner, opened them, passed one to Sal, and fairly collapsed on his amp.

“Sounded great,” said Imani, almost as an afterthought.

“A little short,” said Flora. Sal, teasingly, started playing the drum bridge of the Hobgoblins’ “Gravesend Rag.” Graeme put the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Anything but that,” Flora groaned.

“It's actually not a bad idea,” Imani said, finishing her lukewarm beer from earlier.

“It's almost — ” Sal tried the roll from the bridge into the chorus. Graeme, who had memorized every note on the _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_ cassette within a week of its release, followed along with a couple dancing notes until they both stumbled on the vicious 3/4 bar to cut back into the verse. “ — almost physically impossible,” Sal finished.

Flora and Imani shared one of those meaningful looks again. Sal’s eyes met Graeme’s, widening comically by palpable degrees in semi-successful attempt to communicate _please let them not decide to play that song_.

“What about a cover,” Graeme suggested. “Crucia used to do ‘Unwind’ by Green River.”

They argued about what exactly to cover for about fifteen minutes, unable to settle even on an era or genre, before Imani called a halt and gave everybody a take-home assignment like a kindergarten teacher. “Go home, pick something, and be prepared to share it with the class,” she said. “That includes you, Flor.”

“What about you?”

“I have my pick already. Dinosaur Jr., ‘Freak Scene.’”

“Mani,” Flora tried, “seriously, I don’t know if these Stone Roses-loving baggy kids are ready for all that — ”

Imani stopped her with two fingers like a zipper across her lips. “Save it for next time, love.”

Sal wanted to run the problem section of “Sound and Fury” once more, so he and Flora lurched through the changes while Imani and Graeme straightened up and then headed upstairs into the strange ear-ringing silence, flicking lights on, gathering the mail scattered in the front hall, checking the phone messages (one from Mitzi, two from Evvy at Hellfire Club), putting the kettle on. Graeme felt asleep on his feet all of a sudden, leaned up against the counter, head against the cupboards, closed his eyes, came back to himself as Imani pressed a mug of hot tea into his hands. “You sounded really good today,” she said.

Direct praise from her was a little rare. “Thanks, Imani,” he said, meaning it about as much as he'd ever meant anything. “I mean, they’re your songs.”

She gave him a smile that was a little sad. “They’re our songs now. That's the weirdest part.”

“How so?”

She sat up on the counter perpendicular to him, absently circling a teaspoon in her mug with a tinkling music. “Before, when we gave our songs to the boys, to Jack and Ras I mean, they were pretty much gone instantly. Part of that is because — well, I used to never write lyrics. When someone else does that for your song… it just feels… it's been taken from you and given another life. I don't necessarily mind that, you know, and usually, with the boys I mean, what I would have said was almost the same thing they ended up saying…” 

“Really?”

“Kind of. I mean, maybe a little more…” She laughed. “A little more frustrated. But that was just how it was, I guess. I never knew it could be… like _this_ , instead, you know?”

“Not really — like what?”

“It’s so different, playing with you two. You and Sal just made the songs… more real. Like you helped us make a film out of the book, or something. They’re… four-dimensional, because — you brought _your_ meaning. You didn’t take away my meaning. You just added yours too. There must be some real alchemy in that.”

Graeme looked into the rich, shivering surface of his tea for something to say beyond the obvious, which he said anyway: “Thank you. I’m glad. Glad it works, I guess.”

“I’d like to say I knew it would.” Imani shrugged. “Flora might contest me on that. And besides, we haven’t yet faced the dual gauntlet of the press and the fickle fans…”

Sal and Flora came up presently, and they made plans for rehearsal on Tuesday evening, after Imani and Flora’s scheduled meetings with a slate of potential sound engineers for the Dyatlov & Roswell residency and subsequent tour. Graeme said his goodbyes and walked home in the sunset through streets he'd never seen before that glowed rosy gold in the last light of day. At the tiny supermarket on the corner he bought a selection of items that might have passed for groceries — tonic water, raspberries, milk, eggs, butter, a box of PG Tips, a loaf of day-old bread — and carried them home (home!) as the brightest of the stars blinked on in the pale darkness. The apartment was dark and still and cavernously empty and cold. Quiet except for the street sounds echoing in the bare plaster. He made an egg on toast and a gin and tonic and then had a hot shower and lay down in a nest of his clothes on the bedroom floor to read through the new issue of _Melody Maker,_ which he'd bought just because of the sidebar images of Pavement and the Breeders on the cover, except that he fell asleep before he'd gotten through the letters to the editor.

He woke up stiff-necked and sore at midnight, hair still damp, and lay there on the floor on the pile of his clothes for a while, staring at the ceiling, trying to go back into the bittersweet dream which he hardly remembered except for the rough shape of it: home, water, trees; aching, exhausted, sitting-on-his-chest homesickness he never let himself feel when he was awake; the sun behind the mountains and under the clouds, the rain, the sound, the sound… It went away quickly, so that he missed it very badly, and at last he went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea with a little scotch in it and sat on the bedroom floor with Wray’s guitar and tried to play the exact sound of the dream and home and the missing as it slipped from his fingers like a minnow, or an aspen leaf in the wind.

\--

Moira went to D&R on Monday morning and hung out in the doorway of the curio shop across the street, chain-smoking, people-watching, waiting for the auspicious arrival of Imani Rose and Flora St. James, who she had seen only once before outside a magazine, onstage at Newgrange in Dublin after the release of the Hobgoblins LP _Erebus and Terror._ In the end, she recognized them before they even came around the corner, because the general aura of unfuckwithability preceded them. Nevertheless, when someone came to the always-locked deliveries entrance to let them in, Moira crushed her cigarette under the toe of her loafer, jogged across the street, and called out, “Wait up!”

It was kind of a miracle that this worked. The kid in the door couldn’t've been twenty. “Who’re you?”

“Moira — here for the — ” She gestured vaguely in the direction of Imani and Flora, who were watching her with bemusement. The kid looked kind of flustered and like he was about to say something about checking with the boss, so Moira just beamed and said, “Thanks.”

He blushed. “Oh, well, of course, lift’s over here…”

They were all three herded into the rickety wrought iron cage and sent aloft toward the balcony and the sound booth. Sal had told Moira about D&R, in excruciating detail, many times, so that she already knew it was three times larger than any room she’d ever mixed before — the largest being the 500-capacity Newgrange, and otherwise basements, an abandoned crypt near Phoenix Park, the wizarding student center at Trinity College, the backyards of a handful of wizarding pubs, et cetera. Maybe this was out of her depth, except that just about every interesting thing Moira had ever done was out of her depth. And she had done it anyway. What was this by comparison?

A couple people were milling about in the balcony already. Intriguingly, and typically, Moira noted, they were uniformly men. There was a petite woman in her late thirties with a bleached platinum bob leaning up against the sound board, speaking mutedly to a quiet, dour Lurch-type guy who must have been six foot six. Imani and Flora went and joined them, so Moira walked down to the lowest row of the balcony and tried to get a feel for the magic in the room.

There was great beauty in an empty room, she thought. It wasn't so much like a blank canvas as like an artwork of incredible historical significance that somebody had given you a bucket of red paint and permission to go over. The base magic was pretty perfectly simple — most of it was in the racks of speakers hanging from either side of the stage. Some wizarding venues (like Newgrange, for instance) wouldn’t have speakers at all, leaving the sound engineer responsible for amplification along with mixing and any and all effects. Larger venues like D&R, Poveglia, down the street, Club d’Enfer, in Paris, and Lady Macbeth’s, in Glasgow, boasted all the mod cons of the best available Muggle technology, which could also be manipulated, along with everything else, by a master engineer. Basically, this was going to be a great deal easier than what Moira was used to.

She sat down in the front row of the balcony and listened with bored intrigue as Blondie and Lurch went through the dudes. Onstage, a long-suffering stagehand rang a triangle into a series of microphones and the dudes valiantly endeavored to make it sound interesting. A couple of them were pretty good. A couple more had clearly been told their entire lives that they were pretty good, but they weren’t. Most of them were really bad. Several Imani and Flora vetoed after less than thirty seconds.

The dudes were each dismissed with promises of forthcoming phone calls with next steps. Moira listened for her cue, and then it came. Lurch said, in his remarkably gentle voice, “Well, looks like that’s it — ”

She bolted out of her seat and scampered up the balcony stairs toward the mixing board. “Wait — hold on, sorry, I just dozed off, down there…”

They were all looking at her with a blend of intrigue and consternation. Imani, leaning up against the board, looked like she might rather be anywhere else in the world, which — Moira couldn’t blame her. Lurch filtered through the papers on his clipboard. “We’ve gone through everybody on the list,” he said apologetically.

“Really? Oh, gosh…” Sometimes she surprised herself with the things she would say when she played this character. “I called, just the other day, left a message with that kid — what’s his name, I think that was him at the door downstairs…”

Lurch and Blondie exchanged a look. “Simon,” said Blondie wryly. “He’s bloody useless.”

Moira tried a nervous laugh, wringing the strap of her bag in her hands. “Well,” she said, “I understand if you guys are done for the day, but — ”

“No,” Flora said. _Yes!_ Moira thought. “What’s your name?”

“Moira Devlin — I mostly work at home in Dublin, but, seems like there’s more work in London these days…”

“Come on and show us what you can do, Moira Devlin,” said Imani, stepping back from the board.

Moira cracked her knuckles, set her bag down on the floor, peeled off her coat and the strangling mask of the nervous girl character. She ran her hands over the board, feeling the magic in it, and after a couple seconds she felt good enough about what she was going to do to reset the sliders and cue the triangle guy on stage to give it a good ring in the leftmost mic. The moment the sound hit the room she swooped in and lifted it like a broken-winged bird healed by a child with popsicle sticks… washed it with an echoing flood of reverb and gestured to the triangle guy to move on to the other mics. It was like trying to conduct a symphony with four identical instruments, she thought, shifting the pitch of the next triangle tone to compliment the first. The next one she processed and looped so that it cooed like a theremin, and the last she broke down and flattened to bring out the the percussive beats rather than the ringing tones. It was a little Throbbing Gristle, a little Terry Riley. For years after that she wished she’d recorded it. When it was over she reset the sliders again, stepped back from the board, and swept her hair away from her face. “Only so much I can do without the amps onstage,” she said, “and without a crack at the mics…”

There was a general slackjawedness on display among the spectators, even the lightning crew, who had emerged like naked mole rats from their dark bower to observe the proceedings.

Flora was careful to betray nothing in her voice. “That was well done, Moira,” she said. She gave Imani a meaningful look, and Imani gave her a heterophonically mirrored look back. _Success,_ Moira thought. “We’ll give you a call.”

“There’s just one more thing,” Moira told them. This was perhaps the key, but it had to be played very delicately. “If it's alright…”

“What is it?”

“Well…” She grabbed her bag under the mixing board and fished around in it for a few desperate seconds before she remembered, with an incredible wash of relief, that the demo tapes were in her coat pocket. “I play in this band, um, a kind of feminist garage rock group…”

\--

Sal didn’t answer the phone (Moira had taken him out to lunch and bought him an expensive leather belt and then explained that it was very likely she had gotten an extremely interesting new job), but Graeme came over in the midafternoon, arriving about five minutes after two pizzas from the shop down the street. It was warm enough to eat on the little patio out back, looking over the high fence beyond Flora’s struggling spring garden into the vivid cornflower sky, strewn with fine, cotton-pulling-apart clouds. “How did it go,” Graeme asked. “Did you find somebody?”

“Did we ever,” said Flora.

Inside, as Flora explained the backstory — “Everybody — or, I guess, almost everybody — was a genius professional, but there was this one Irish girl…” — Imani flipped over the Sluagh’s demo in the cassette player and pressed play once again on side A. A roar of vengeful sound emerged from the tinny speakers. “Whoa,” said Graeme.

Imani and Flora shared a look. “That’s what I said,” said Flora.

The songs were about two minutes long. They’d been put to four-track tape in the most rudimentary possible mix: vocals, two guitars — one of them tuned a few steps down in place of a bass player — and drums, clattering in an overwhelming racket. Flora's mind produced the phrase “bitten-off rage.” Graeme’s brow was furrowed in an illegible sort of way. He seemed to be bodily absorbing every blow of the guitar. “It’s the singer?” he asked eventually.

“She plays guitar too.”

“She’s really good.”

“We figured one of us can do sound for her,” Flora explained, “and then she can do sound for us.”

“What’s her name?”

“Moira Devlin.”

“And what’s the band called?”

“The Sluagh,” said Flora.

“What?”

“The Sluagh,” said Imani.

“Sorry — the Sloo—”

“The Sloo-ahh.”

“The host of the unforgiven dead,” Flora explained, recalling this from some or another History of Magic seminar. “It’s the instance of the wild hunt motif in Gaelic mythology.”

Graeme clearly had no idea what she was talking about. “Right,” he said.

They stood in silence listening to track three. The track listing on the card set inside the case, clearly photocopied from a photocopy at a Muggle printshop, judging by its smudginess and illegibility, gave this song’s title as “Illegal Abortion.”

“Sal will love it,” Imani said. “I wonder if he knows them. Being from Dublin and all.”

Flora watched Graeme shake himself bodily out of the thrall of the music. “Wait — what did you say her name was? The engineer, the singer?”

“Moira,” Flora reminded him. “Moira Devlin.”

“Huh,” Graeme said.

“What?”

Graeme’s face went through stages of realizing maybe he shouldn’t have said anything at all. “Isn’t that Sal’s girlfriend’s name?”

\--

Imani had been to Byberry a handful of times before. After all, Jack had been in there for about a year. Every time she left feeling like she could add another paragraph to her mental draft of a somewhat hypothetical _Prophet_ op-ed about the racism inherent in the wizarding prison system. She stood there clenching her jaw tightly enough to explode one of her fillings while the wardens patted down her hair. Then they let her into the pale drab cafeteria room where a couple family members and friends were already clustered at tables with their respective inmates. Jack was sitting by himself in a corner, resting his temple in the palm of his hand, staring into space with a vacant expression that stirred some deep primal fear in Imani’s soul. Probably he was seeing all those things she knew he still saw sometimes because of the unicorn blood curse, she thought. And anyway, as soon as she sat down it went away, like it had never been there, and he looked almost happy, if tired. His face was still thinner than it was supposed to be, but there was that old conniving curiosity behind the eyes again, which she had recognized the first time she had ever met him.

They weren’t allowed to hug. They had made that mistake the first time and had been bodily separated, which was when Imani had started mentally drafting the op-ed. Instead they clasped each other’s right hand tightly, and then Imani started unloading all the stuff from her bag that the wardens had well rifled through for fifteen minutes before letting her in the door. A tin of shea butter, snacks, a couple guitar picks, batteries, books, and, finally, an advance copy of _Severe Asceticism_ on cassette.

“Don’t let that fall into the wrong hands, now,” Imani said, when Jack picked it up.

“This is probably the safest place in all of Britain for it to be,” Jack mused, opening the little box and perusing the tracklisting printed on the tape. “Amortentia let you put ‘Feast Day’ on here?”

“It was an… extensive debate. Requiring insane amounts of paperwork and a great deal of craftiness. But we can’t release it as a single, even though it rips.”

“Especially because it rips,” Jack corrected. “When’s it coming out?”

“Fourth of August. And the shows at D&R start on the sixth.”

“Have someone videotape it, will you?” Jack pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “First My Bloody Valentine toured with the Jesus and Mary Chain _and_ Dinosaur Jr. And now this…”

“Only you would hate being in prison mostly because of all the concerts you're missing.”

“The concerts are like symbols of how the world outside is moving while this place stands stock still.” Jack shrugged. Sometimes he tended to talk in lyrics, Imani thought. “How’s the live show shaping up?”

“Well, I think we’ll meet our goal to melt every face in the audience, especially Mitzi’s.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Is that it?”

Imani sighed. This was what she’d come here to talk to him about, at the end of the day. “The set sounds awesome. We’re going to play the whole record, plus ‘Gravesend Rag’ and ‘Life’s What You Make It’ by Talk Talk.”

“That’s going to be killer.”

“Sal’s idea,” Imani admitted. She’d tried for Dinosaur Jr., Flora for the Kinks, Graeme for Big Star. “Jack, I get to jam every day and tour for the foreseeable future with three of the best musicians I’ve ever known. No offense.”

Jack smirked. He shouldn’t’ve been offended, considering he was likely a more creative songwriter than the four of them combined — not that Imani would ever tell him that. “None taken,” he said.

“But that’s not what it's about,” she said. “Isn’t it. We weren’t virtuosos when we started playing.”

“You know as well as I do that charisma and virtuosity aren't mutually exclusive,” Jack said. “Far from it.”

“I think I thought if I got the best drummer and the best guitarist I know there would be no way it could be bad. But it's more than that, you know? We had… something, some ineffable thing. And I just don't know, I don't know if we have that.”

Jack studied her face. “Do you know that you _don’t_ have that?”

Imani groaned. “I don't know that either.”

“I know it won’t be bad,” Jack told her. “It couldn’t be. It’s you and Flora.”

“Well that’s very reassuring of you Jackie but — ”

“How does it feel when the four of you jam together?”

Imani thought about the basement. With all four of them in there, it often felt impossibly crowded and inhumanly loud, but, in that, there was a great aliveness, so that sometimes she closed her eyes and remembered being twenty years old in the basement of Ras’s place on Western Road. And when she opened her eyes and she wasn't there, when she saw somebody else behind the drum kit, her heart broke, just a little bit, every time. But there was nothing else to do with the pain besides put it into the music.

“Not the same,” she told Jack. “But I think that’s good.”

Jack nodded, grinning. “That’s probably very good.”

“Maybe it's about me,” Imani mused. “I never had to be a frontwoman. I never even had to stand in the front.”

“Because they were always putting you in the back,” Jack pointed out.

“Who’s _they_? _You_ put me in the back too, Jack!” 

“Mani, you play drums and the drummer usually goes in the back — ”

“ — fine. We don’t have to relitigate this…”

“If there's ever a _reunion tour_ — ” Imani could hear the sneer in his voice, even if it barely showed on his face — “we’ll put you on a riser in the front. And we’ll all stand behind you so that nobody can see us.”

“Mmm, I like the sound of that…”

In the periphery of her vision she saw the warden who had been standing by the door going around to all the tables doing his not-so-very-kind _hurry up please it's time._ Across the table, she felt more than saw Jack's shoulders stiffen — like a sympathetic muscle memory. The worst thing was thinking about how much time he had to be alone.

“Mani.”

“Hmm?”

“Listen, you have something I never — or I did but — I didn't know what to — very different but — ”

“Out with it, Childermass.”

“You have Flora.”

Imani met his eyes. “I do,” she said, “don’t I?”

“Don't take it for granted that somebody loves you. Alright? That's all that matters.”

He was wrong all the time, most of the time, maybe, but when he was right, he was right. In the window, after they had manhandled her hair again on the way out, she blew a kiss to him in the bulletproof window. He caught it, grinning somehow despite everything, soundlessly jangling the terrible silvery manacles, and slapped it against his cheek.

\---

\--

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the music from chapters one and two: [here](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/643465356332122112/saint-rose-and-the-thorns-fluorescentgrey)


	3. 3.

**3.**

**August 1992**

\--

The day of the judgement, when it eventually arrived with a predictable vengeance, dawned like any other day: warm, clear, cup of tea, gin and tonic, fried egg on toast. Hot shower that he refused to get out of until it turned cold. He made another gin and tonic, sitting at the kitchen table with his wet hair dripping down his neck, looking into the black mirror, thinking about calling Lockett and — what? Asking to be distracted for six full hours to keep from drinking until the nerves stopped needling him? Eventually, in the early afternoon, he threw some necessaries in his backpack, including a flask of gin — they had brought their gear over the afternoon previous — and set about walking four miles across London to Knockturn Alley and the club where he'd be spending most of the coming month, Dyatlov & Roswell.

Graeme had been there a few times before, which was the only reason he had any confidence whatsoever about finding his way there now. They had shot a music video for “The Girls, Part II” in one of the myriad sub-basements in June. On the way over from Shacklewell, in the fancy black car Hellfire Club had hired for the four of them, Graeme had asked Imani, “Are you sure you want me to be in this?”

Sal turned toward the window, cocking an eyebrow and settling back in his seat with his arms folded over his chest in a kind of self-satisfied secondhand embarrassment, the way he often did when anyone did anything he perceived to be ridiculous.

“What do you mean?” Imani asked, stern but cool.

“Well, I mean, I don’t play on the album, and I’ve never done this before — ”

“Neither have we,” said Flora. “Amortentia would never let us shoot one for the Hobgoblins.”

“They thought the Witching Hour was going to fizzle out,” Imani explained, referring to the nightly music video show on the only magical TV station in the UK, Wizarding Video Wireless. Imani and Flora had W.V.W. on sometimes at their place, and it was largely confusing, like a public access TV channel with occasional footage from the weird UK wizarding government, that confounding broomstick sport, live concerts from chamber music groups and pop singers, and, every night at midnight, an hour of music videos from contemporary bands. Imani and Flora claimed that they watched this program religiously, almost every night, as “opposition research.”

“You’re very photogenic, Graeme,” Flora said, rooting around in the limo’s mini-fridge.

“That's not what I meant — ”

“You’ve got to stop asking if I’m sure,” Imani told him cooly, “because it’ll make me not so sure.”

Everybody was a little on edge. Something about the imminent sword of Damocles ever oscillating overhead, and the heat, especially in the basement of D&R, where a handful of cooling charms working overtime seemed to have next to no impact on the suffocating humidity. The music video directors were a young duo of genderless aesthetes who had recently graduated from the Magical College of Art in Glasgow, and who, thankfully, seemed just about as out of their depth as everybody else. Before the band’s arrival, they had filled the basement with various mirrors and positioned them to create all these trippy gateways, so that every step you took around the room was doubled and tripled and refracted and fragmented and magnified. While the cameras were meticulously situated, they were all marched off for hair and makeup and costuming. “You have such beautiful curls,” said the stylist whose unenviable job was to make Graeme look presentable.

The video accompanied the release of the single “The Girls, Part II” in early July 1992. Hay was made of Imani’s insistence on wearing a t-shirt silkscreened with the cover of Public Enemy’s _Fear of a Black Planet_. (She also wore this shirt in the photoshoot for the cover of the _Prophet_ arts section in November of that year, but the photographs were airbrushed to remove the logo.) Hay was also made in a handful of still-circulating Hobgoblins fanzines with regard to the alleged pointedness of some of the song's lyrics. (“Wait until they hear ‘I Was Also,’” Flora said wryly when she heard.) Hay was mostly made of the song’s blatantly queer content and theme, more hay even than about the fact that it was very good. Graeme was used to this, to some extent, having weathered basically all the press about the Crucia LP focusing on the fact that the person who had co-written all the songs was dead. Imani and Flora, of course, ignored about ninety-nine percent of the press they got, and, if they noticed, didn’t seem to care. Sal was pissed off and carried on drunkenly in the pub for hours so that Graeme had to half-carry him out and pour him into a cab.

It was a shame, really, because the video looked great. Imani’s power stance, Docs and miniskirt, bright blue eyeshadow; the endless mirror shot of Flora’s ever-tapping vintage heel, her estate sale jewelry, red lip, cuffed Levis; Sal, ever obscuring his face behind his cymbals and a series of mirrors, flexing a tattooed bicep as the drums clattered into the bridge. Graeme thought he himself looked silly; they really made his hair embarrassingly floppy when they wanted to take his picture, and he hadn't really known what to do with himself, so he had thrown his guitar around a lot, laid down on the floor, sat on the bass drum, leaned against Flora, et cetera. Something about it must have worked, because when the video aired on the Witching Hour Imani looked pretty tight-lipped until all the fake theatrical antics he had mimed during the guitar solo made her laugh out loud.

The tangible impact of the video was that the first week of shows at D&R sold out pretty much immediately. Neither Graeme nor Sal, in their respective memories, had ever played a sold out gig, let alone a week of sold out gigs in a fifteen-hundred capacity venue. “There was this one show where they stopped letting people into Alki Gallery because of the fire code or whatever,” Graeme recalled over a pint. “But, I mean, like sixty people can fit into Alki Gallery.”

“We had to quit in the middle of our set at Newgrange once,” Sal said, “because the floor collapsed. But that was more about the floor than us.”

They had spent most of the interim time between then and now rehearsing in the basement, or on their own in their respective flats. They debated potential setlists, which reliably turned into Sal and Graeme sitting in the corner, sipping beers, reading, or dozing off while Imani and Flora argued. Then they tested the limits of their magic and their voices by running the full ninety-minute set, sometimes twice or three times through. Then they would emerge, sweaty, numb, and semi-deaf, and go for a walk in the park through the fading of the day, and sometimes one of them would go to the cornershop and come back with a handful of popsicles or a 40oz bottle of malt liquor in a paper bag they would share between each other. Then they would go back and do it again.

So, logically, Graeme knew, this was all going to be just fine. By this point, he knew the entire set by heart. Sometimes he found he could tell instinctively, just from feeling the way Imani shifted the magic in her keys or microphone, what song she was going into next. He knew he could have stood up there with his eyes closed in the pitch dark and followed her even without seeing her. The problem of course was that it wasn’t going to be like that at all. There were going to be fifteen hundred people in the room with them now, staring them down, waiting for either a trainwreck or a revelation. He had been thinking of that first Crucia show with just the four of them; the pressure, the expectation, and the strangeness: it was going to be like that, except in front of _ten times_ as many people.

The back way into Knockturn Alley, which put you out right around the corner from D&R, was through an old art shop in one of the little mews off the Regent Street in Soho. By the time Graeme got there, the sun was beginning to sink over the edge of the city, throwing the cool magnolia blanket of summer evening over the tall white buildings, narrow mews wavering into pitchy twilight, shoppers arm in arm, restaurants and pubs spilling laughter and music through the open windows. In the art shop, cool and dark, all wood-paneled with stacks of paints and pastels and racks of fancy paper throwing strikes of vivid color toward the high ceiling, the young clerk was filing her nails behind the lonely counter, blaring the Suede single “The Drowners” over an antique Muggle radio. Graeme nodded in her direction and watched recognition slip over her face like a Halloween mask. “Break a leg,” she said wryly as he went back toward the pigments aisle.

Sal, Imani, and Flora had explained the secret door when they’d come for the video shoot. All the way in the back of the pigments aisle, where they kept the rare stuff that cost hundreds of pounds, there was a single corked glass bottle of something brown called “caput mortum.”

“It's made of mummies,” Imani had said.

“What?”

“Ground up Egyptian mummies,” Sal clarified. “Mostly humans and cats. Well, this one’s almost entirely cats.”

_Almost?_ “What!”

“Well, at some point they started running out of mummies,” Imani explained, “and they had to use whatever corpses they could get.”

“We told you this place could be kind of fucked up,” Flora said, clocking the horrified expression on Graeme’s face. “You just push the cork in.”

“It’s — wait, I thought you said not to touch anything!”

“You’re white and you have pure blood,” Sal reminded him. (Sal himself was half blood, his father being a professor of Middle Eastern art at Trinity College in Dublin, and his mother, about whom he would not elaborate, being a witch.) “So you're doing all the touching.”

It was unclear if there was actually any mummy pigment in the glass bottle, but when you pushed the cork in, an intricately carven doorknob shaped like a skull appeared in the previously blank wood-paneled wall to the right. Imani, Flora, and Sal had had Graeme touch this too. Beyond the door, the alley unfolded, prematurely dark in the twilight given the steep overhanging eaves of the soot-blackened buildings, wending uphill through smoky glass storefronts and ancient, rounded cobbles toward the more wholesome part of Wizarding London, where Imani and Flora said they rarely set foot. “It's like Disney World,” Sal had explained. “For school kids.”

This time, when Graeme turned the skull knob and pushed, someone beyond the door yelped in surprise. There was such a crowd assembled in that narrow choleric mews that people had backed up against the stretch of concrete where the portal to the real world turned out, necessitating some complex human tetris before he could get through and shut the door behind him. At first he wondered what they all were doing there, given most of the curio shops closed around five and were stocked with items that this motley crew of youngish hipsters couldn't possibly afford. Then he realized they were staring at him.

It took him about five minutes to navigate through the crowd up to the stage door at D&R, through a sea of fans who either backed away like he was some kind of visiting dignitary or stepped up basically nose-to-nose with him to ask for his autograph and touch his hair. When he finally got through the door into the dark, cool, cavernous underbelly of the venue, he felt kind of manhandled and filthy, and not in the good way, and his heart was beating somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. At some point somebody had kissed him. He was also pretty sure somebody had cut some of his hair off. Croydon, the co-owner and accountant at D&R whose sheer size meant he doubled as security, was down there keeping an eye on the door. “Sugarbush,” he said, in his surprisingly gentle voice, looking Graeme up and down like he was flotsam from some terrible shipwreck. “Everybody’s in green room two.”

Imani, Flora, and Sal were in the dressing room on the third floor with Evvy and Moira, Graeme’s guitar, and two people he didn’t recognize, one of whom was holding a big Minolta camera. “There you are,” Imani said when he came in. “We sent a car for you, but they called and said you weren’t at home.”

“We were taking bets on whether you hopped in the Floo,” Flora told him, slapping his back genially but with more than a little vengeance.

Graeme laughed as well as he could, sounding scared and flat even to his own ear. Little did they know he had disappeared much the same way from his normal life back home over something likely a great deal less difficult than this was about to be. “There are hundreds of people outside,” he said, grabbing his guitar in the corner and setting about tuning it. Sal passed him a cold Newcastle from the mini-fridge, which he accepted gratefully. “I nearly lost all my clothes. And hair.”

“Yeah, that’s why we sent the car.”

The two strangers turned out to be the writer Magda Cruz and a photojournalist from _Wizarding Rock Weekly_ , whose August cover they would grace in a few weeks' time. Doors opened around twenty minutes later, and the Sluagh was on at 8:30. Sal took over sound for Moira while she played, and Graeme joined him in the booth to watch; so too did Imani and Flora, eventually, when the band's unholy maelstrom of sound could not easily be ignored from backstage.

Moira was like a redheaded Kathleen Hanna clutching a beat-up candy-red Gibson. She put her entire gut into her screaming so that you were surprised blood didn’t come out. The other guitarist, Kelton, and the drummer, Meabh, locked one another into a tight, unshakeable groove seemingly by means of telepathy, and then Moira smeared red paint over the top of it with her voice and the guttural scraping of her guitar. From someplace unseen the technical crew washed the stage in waves of sheer white light, sparking off Moira’s rings and her chipped front tooth. And Sal mixed her vocal with such loving, attentive grace that it made Graeme’s heart hurt. Sending her processed scream under the churn of Kelton’s lower-pitched guitar, lifting her croon above a protracted wail of feedback…

Graeme couldn’t understand a word Moira was singing but thought he knew exactly what all the songs were about anyway. She was asking to be heard. Or she wasn't asking — she was grasping the crowd gently but firmly by the face and telling them, I will be heard. When the light washed over the floor of the cavernous venue, Graeme could see that some people had their fingers in their ears. It was almost hilarious: there was nothing they could’ve done that could have drowned out the sound, no matter how hard they tried.

He remembered the decision he had made behind the Den about a year and a half previous: to bleed loud enough to be heard. In their own way, he thought, watching Moira scrape the pickups of her guitar over her mic stand, they had all made such a decision at some consequential juncture in their short, strange lives. Much as he had then, taking Alex’s hand, stepping onstage into the sound, he felt buoyed by a sudden certainty. Even — especially! — if nobody else in the room liked it, they would make themselves be heard anyway. At the end of the day, that was all that mattered.

He felt almost fine about it after that, even mildly excited, until the Sluagh finished their set and Imani and Flora disappeared to their dressing room. After a moment standing there awkwardly with Sal waiting for Moira to get back to the booth, Graeme went off toward his dressing room too. It was not entirely clear what exactly this period of time was for, beyond purposes of unparalleled psychic torture. Graeme sat in the rickety chair before the mirror, trying very hard not to look at himself in it, and eventually he poured himself a shot of gin, and then another, and then refilled his flask, and then he realized his hands were shaking.

For years, people would ask him what he was thinking in this moment. The truth was that even he could not decipher the whims of his own mind that had led him to this imminently consequential decision. His brain was moving ahead of the rest of him at incomprehensible speeds. He looked at himself in the mirror — the first bad (or maybe good) idea — and thought he looked so boring. When did anybody ever say anything interesting in a flannel shirt and jeans? He wasn't some random grunge-posturing hanger-on — if he was, Imani and Flora wouldn’t’ve asked him to come all the way to London to play in this band.

He must have figured it was time he proved it. That was all.

At home, in Crucia, he’d never worn anything interesting on stage. That had been Wray and Alex’s game. Leaving the flat he'd shoved some things in his backpack just in case. One of them, balled up at the bottom of the bag, was the pale pink silk slip dress Wray had gotten at Goodwill to wear on stage on a dare, which Graeme had brought with him from Seattle in a fit of guilt-ridden something or other. He’d never even put it on before, but he stripped and piled everything on the vanity and pulled it on carefully over his head. It was a little tight across the upper chest but surprisingly it went okay over the hips, and the hem came to rest about two inches above the knee. The fabric was a little wrinkled but otherwise pristinely soft. A chill went through him when he smoothed it down over his hips. How did women wear things like this without shivering all the time?

He looked at himself in the mirror again. The fine, delicate fabric was a confounding contrast against his bony, square shoulders and dark underarm hair and the handful of messy, half-finished stick-and-poke tattoos scattering his upper arms. It was easy to think of it as a costume, but it wasn’t — not exactly. He remembered what Sal had said: _nothing's ever as black and white as it seems…_ Before he could think twice about it he put his boots and flannel shirt back on, and then he went out and back up the hallway toward the stage.

The girls were at the edge of the proscenium, eyeing what was visible of the audience while communicating inside one another’s minds. Flora was wearing three-inch vintage heels from Terry de Havilland and a black brocade suit, so that Graeme knew without seeing her face that she would have red lipstick on. Imani had put her hair in Bantu knots and secured each one with a glittering chain of magical lights, and she wore a beaded dress that looked like a black waterfall, and Doc Martens like Graeme’s, except they were bright yellow. Graeme felt like he was walking toward his own execution. Flora, standing nearest the stairs, saw him first. Her face transformed with delight and she looked him up and down like he was a cold beer on a hot day. “Look at those legs,” she announced.

Imani turned heel. Her jaw dropped a little. He felt like sinking back into the shadows. “Graeme, where did that come from?”

“It was Wray’s. You don’t think it’s a little short?”

“Well, I mean, kind of, but — ”

“All the more reason you ought to wear it.”

“Just make sure you cross your legs when you sit down.”

Sal came up the stairs and joined them, fairly vibrating with nervous energy. “Ladies,” he said. “What's the plan?”

“You boys go out there and make as much noise as you humanly can,” Imani said.

“Easy enough,” Graeme told her. His voice sounded like it was coming from outside his head.

“I’ll cue you and we’ll go right into ‘Feast Day,’” Imani went on. “You have the setlist?”

Sal nodded. Graeme touched the front pocket of his flannel where he’d tucked the folded piece of paper next to his flask of gin. “You all ready?” Sal asked.

“Yep,” said Flora. There was a tightness to her voice that belied her nervousness. Imani nodded, mouth pursed tightly, shaking her hands as though she missed having drumsticks in them. Graeme hadn’t thought about how new this was going to be for the girls too. This was their first time being the co-centers of attention at a sold-out gig. Before, they’d been concealed to some extent behind the reliable clusterfuck of whatever Boardman and Childermass needed to publicly hash out.

“Graeme?” Sal said.

“I’m ready,” he said. Then, for some fucking reason, “I’ll go.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” The more he talked himself into it, the less terrible of an idea it sounded. “I’ll tune the guitar and start — Sal, give me two, maybe three minutes?”

“Are you sure?”

“More than.” He shared with them all a smile that might have been extremely fragile. “Break a leg.”

“Wait, you’re going now?”

“It’s nine thirty, isn’t it?”

It was nine thirty-four. Upstairs, hunched over the sound booth in the balcony, Moira was getting impatient.

They looked between each other in a state of shared fear. And then — he never remembered who started this — they reached for each other and scrummed up like rugby players. Indeed, they would do this at every show they ever played together for the rest of their tenure as a quartet.

“Knock em dead,” Flora said into their shared silence. Graeme felt Imani’s hand curl into a fist against his back.

“Heads will roll,” Sal agreed.

“Do we know if Mitzi’s out there?” Imani asked.

“Let’s play like she is,” Graeme advised, hating this woman without ever having met her.

“Amen to that.”

Then they stood up. And Graeme took one two three steps past the rest of them and into the light.

You have to put yourself in the minds of all these trendy Londoners, Graeme would later explain to Lockett in the two way mirror. They were waiting to see the triumphant comeback of two of the most well-beloved musicians in British wizarding rock history. And first to appear on stage was an ungainly twenty-two year old American boy in a pink dress. They might have recognized him, from the magazines and the music video, but it was a surface-level recognition, a recognition-by-association. This was different. There was a confused cheer that settled into thrall, or a pall, of strange and intoxicating silence. He felt drawn like a magnet to the only thing on stage that made sense, which was his guitar. He put it on, plugged it in, got the amps humming. When the sleeve of his flannel slipped off his shoulder he let it stay there, feeling like Sargent's Madame X. Then he turned toward the crowd.

He was horribly and wonderfully aware, for perhaps the first time in his life, of how deeply and thoroughly he was being seen, and by how many people, all of whom were attempting to memorize as much of him as was visible, which was most of him, because he had decided to wear the fucking dress for whatever now-unthinkable reason, and mentally expostulate on what wasn’t visible, which likely did not require much imagination, also given the dress. How was it possible that it felt so good and so bad at the same time? It was like the feeling of the sun and the feeling of the sunburn in tandem equivalence.

They aren’t really seeing me, Graeme thought, kneeling — carefully in the dress — to tune his guitar. The wood floor was cool against his bare knees. They’re seeing the costume that I put on, he told himself. This costume maybe more revealing than a lot of the other costumes, in more ways than one, but a costume nonetheless. He took the setlist and his flask of gin out from the pocket of his flannel, had a sip, set everything down carefully next to the pedalboard, pinning the folded sheet of paper bearing Imani’s scrawled handwriting under his distortion pedal. In the front row there were a handful of people of various genders trying to look up his skirt. Was this how it felt to be Alex or Mercedes? He made a mental note he was sure he wouldn’t remember to ask them about it when this was all over, if it ever was. Then he turned the tuning pedal off and played a bright, centering E7 chord. Not quite right. He filtered the distortion until it choked, leaned into the loop pedal and set great heaving waves of it shaking the room. The magic changed the shape of the sound until it seemed to hover halfway between the balcony and the floor, wobbling and silver like liquid mercury.

If he had had enough of his consciousness about him he would have understood that the attention of the crowd had changed shape too. Here was the rub: when he was just standing there, they saw the costume that he put on. When he started to play, the nature of the magic he put into the sound was such that the mask was lifted and they could not help but see some of who he really was. The deep, cold, mourning, yearning sound in the heart of his very being suffused the room like the scent of autumn. It was excruciating to even think about showing that to anybody else and yet if it hadn't been true he would not have been the musician that he was. He would just have been another curly-headed bisexual white boy with a guitar, which in the nineties were in far from short supply.

He didn't so much see or hear as he felt Sal slip onto the stage behind him as a current moving in water against the wind. The crowd’s great cheer subsumed beneath the noise. It was different than feeling Marsden's drums forcibly corral the sound from underneath him — it was a vaguely rhythmic contribution to all the mess, like the hutch of dishes falling down in the background of the Velvet Underground’s “European Son.” Marsden would have cracked the snare and started into a driving beat, leaving Graeme to catch up or be left behind. Sal rolled low thunder on the tom and the kick drum, snapping a stick against the crash cymbal as an occasional accent. Graeme turned toward him and their eyes met. He was not much there, so that later, in Imani and Flora's green room, drinking champagne from the bottle and laughing together bewilderedly amidst a lot of flashing cameras and flirtation and back-patting, Sal asked him, “Where exactly do you go?” It was strange that he would ask, because for a minute they were suspended in space together, and it could have gone on forever, and maybe it was, in another universe which had touched this one for just a moment…

In the place where he went, it was all outside of himself, and he was just the snake charmer. That was all. He held it all aloft and diffuse for a while longer until Imani and Flora joined them, and the room really shook through a long orgasmic earthquake, a breathlessly prolonged scream of joy. Front and center, Imani held down a droning chord on the organ, and then she turned to Flora, then Graeme, then Sal. This is it, Graeme thought. Somehow he was quite calm. It was incredible how sometimes you could be so terrified and so sure of what to do. The instructions were inside the terror, on the other side of it, where it was only stillness. Sal counted off from one. At three, Flora’s dancing bass joined him with a few flirty grace notes. Imani and Graeme jumped together on four, into the dark pool, where it might have been just the four of them in the basement but for the auspicious fact that the air was supercharged, electric, and between every song they were each of them bowled over like candlepins by a fearsome wave of love.

The write-up in the Sunday _Prophet,_ which Graeme picked up when he went around the shops in the late afternoon for coffee beans, a loaf of bread, some cheese, some grapes, condoms, cigarettes, and gin, read, in part, as follows:

_“How are you all feeling tonight,” Flora St. James asked the adoring audience halfway through her new group Saint Rose’s ninety-minute debut set at Dyatlov & Roswell on Friday. “Because we're scared shitless.” _

_She didn't need to be. The former bassist of the Hobgoblins and her new group with Hobgoblins drummer Imani Rose — rounded out by Crushing Valerian’s Sal Abidi on drums and the American guitarist Graeme Sugarloaf — could have stood on stage and played a half-hour's worth of three-chord punk rock cuts and brought the house down. Instead, they delivered an unforgettable powerhouse set, marking the release of their debut album_ Severe Asceticism, _the first gig of a month-long residency at D &R, and the arrival of a major new era in Wizarding rock and roll. _

_If you are a fellow Wizarding Londoner of the alternative persuasion, you may remember St. James and Rose’s virtuosity and charisma as the rhythm section of the Hobgoblins, one of the foundational local groups of the nineteen-eighties. They seem set on building a similar foundation for the nineteen-nineties, and judging by this weekend, they may very well succeed. St. James and Rose share a writing credit on all twelve songs on Severe Asceticism, and, live, their punchy pop-turned-punk songwriting is transformed and elevated by Abidi’s metronomic rhythmic chops, and by Sugarloaf’s alchemical pyrotechnics. […]_

The blurb was accompanied by a moving portrait of Flora on stage, eyes screwed shut, screaming without sound, the rest of the band a sepia-toned blur in the glimmering background. There was another, smaller photo of the four of them out back of the venue after the gig, sweaty and laughing in the golden glow of the streetlight. Sal was wrenching open a bottle of champagne that, Graeme remembered, somebody had said was actually of pretty good vintage. It tasted like stars. There had been a lot of champagne that night.

He called Imani and Flora from the payphone at the corner of the Richmond Road, because the lighting guy from D&R was probably still asleep on the mattress on the floor at his place, given that they had been up until dawn. Flora picked up after two long, trilling buzzes. “Saint Rose residence.”

“Did you see it?”

“Graeme? You mean the story in the _Prophet_?”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah, Imani’s in the attic looking for this gold frame from an estate sale, years ago…” He heard her cover the base of the phone with her hand. “I’m telling you, Ras has it, darling!”

“You guys are going to frame it?”

“You should too. I mean, they got your name wrong, but they did talk about your alchemical pyrotechnics… Listen, you ought to luxuriate in nice press while you can. It’ll only get worse.”

“Right, well, listen, congrats, Flor. And tell Imani — ”

“Come over for tea and tell her yourself.”

“Now?”

“Tonight? Seven?”

“I’ll be there.”

“See you then,” said Flora. Then, softening her voice: “Listen — you sounded even better than I knew you would, Graeme.”

Back at the flat, the lighting guy was up, figuring out same as Graeme had ninety minutes previous that there was no coffee left. His name was actually Courtney, which was interesting and definitely memorable because Graeme had never met a man named Courtney before, let alone slept with a man named Courtney, even though he thought he remembered in school he had hooked up with a girl named Courtney and once Courtney Love had bummed a cigarette from him outside the Crocodile. And yet, still, he couldn’t for some reason stop thinking of this particular Courtney as “the lighting guy.”

“I was wondering why you don’t even have tea in the house or anything,” Courtney the lighting guy said, “but then I remembered you’re American. How the fuck can you not even have tea in the house?”

“I don't even have a bedframe,” Graeme reminded him. “You want some coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks. Have to go stage manage for the Fae tonight down at the Barghest House.”

Graeme cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t mean the literal — ”

“No — come on. They don’t exist! It’s a hip-hop group.”

“There’s a hip-hop group called the Fae?”

This felt like tempting fate or something. London was fucking wild.

“Want to come? I can put you on the guest list.”

“I said I’d go to Imani and Flora's for tea.”

“See, now you're becoming a true temporary honorary Englishman.” Courtney gave him the sharp, toothy smirk. That had been the first thing Graeme had noticed, in Imani and Flora's green room over champagne. That and Courtney's arms in the Dead Can Dance shirt he'd cut the sleeves off. Next thing he knew they were making out in the lighting cage to the distant, barely-audible strains of the Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold” piped in from the great room like a message of love from another world. Getting felt up in the dress was on a heretofore unexperienced level of eroticism. Then they had taken a cab back to Graeme's flat, drinking more champagne. Courtney put the light on by the bed and Graeme put it off. He'd said the same thing he was always saying, something like, you can push me around a little, I won’t break, but Courtney didn’t, and he liked it anyway. To wit, that was two days previous and he was still around.

“Time for a quickie?” Courtney asked in the kitchen.

“Looks that way.”

They went back to the mattress on the floor. After not so very long Graeme was obliged to get up again and take the screaming kettle off the burner and fetch the condoms he’d left on the kitchen counter. Outside the sun was dropping in the west beyond the river and turning everything deep gold. Then he went back into the bedroom. “You've got to get some kind of poster for these walls or something,” Courtney said. He was lounging in the tangled sheets naked with a pillow in his lap. “It's like an insane asylum in here.”

Graeme laughed. Later, when he was actually kind of institutionalized, though not in an insane asylum and mostly of his own volition, he reflected on this moment as a masterful instance of inadvertent foreshadowing.

He was a nice lover, Courtney, Graeme thought later, walking to the tube at sunset. Shortly after he’d left, Graeme had discovered that he’d left his number, scrawled on a photo of My Bloody Valentine ripped from _Melody Maker_ , on the kitchen counter by the coffeepot. A couple days later, he brought over a Led Zeppelin broadsheet from Camden Market that was roughly Graeme’s height and then helped him affix it to the wall with magic and gaffer tape.

The closer he got to sober, which was vanishingly rare these days, the more he thought about things like how he was only in the mood for a nice lover in those vanishingly rare instances when he felt he deserved it. He was in a great band, they’d played a great debut show, he had new friends who loved him in an incredible city he loved. The great hovering firestorm of grief and guilt might as well have gone on vacation for the weekend, which all but guaranteed it would come back with a vengeance eventually. But for now all that could be ignored in favor of the sunset. Sugary tea. The kind of sex where you laughed the whole time. Being called a virtuosic purveyor of “alchemical pyrotechnics” in the U.K. wizarding paper of record.

Perhaps this was the happiest he’d been since Wray died, he realized on the train, jostling in the thrall of humanity. Around the corner from Imani and Flora’s place, he ducked into an alleyway and finished the last of the gin in the flask in his jeans pocket.

\--

“Do you use condoms,” said the nurse.

Lockett blinked. He looked at the nurse’s clipboard, and then at the nurse, but she was looking down. The point was supposed to be that everything was on the clipboard so that he never had to say it again, but it seemed like this never quite happened the way it was supposed to. “I got it from injecting drugs,” he said.

“But do you use condoms?”

There was a strip in one of the milk crates in his room at the Den, which he’d taken from Royce a long time ago, or maybe even from Devon, but they were probably expired now, because there was never any occasion to use them, and anyway he barely lived there anymore.

“I don’t,” Lockett tried, “don’t really — I would.”

This was awkward enough that the nurse looked up. Lockett tried to drown the urge to grit his teeth and shrink away from her, as though he had elbowed something important and dangerous, like a vial of his own blood, off the counter and onto the floor. “Are you sexually active,” the nurse asked him.

“No.”

She carefully, gently, inserted the pen she was using into the metal clip of her clipboard and lowered it to her side. “You can have a rich and full sex life if you take precautions,” she told him, “like using protection.”

“I — I mean. Okay. Thanks.”

Dear god, she put the clipboard on the counter. Lockett watched one of the blood vials turn over once, like uranium rods jostling doomishly in a b-movie on TV. “Would you say you experience sexual attraction,” the nurse said.

He had to strain to catch his own eyebrows, like loosed balloons. “Um — ”

“And you said you don’t inject drugs anymore?”

As though she had not spent at least fifteen minutes inspecting every conceivable part of his body where one might make such an injection. She had looked between his toes, though she had said she was looking for those sarcoma things. “I quit earlier this year,” he said.

“Heroin?”

“Mostly…”

“Wreaks havoc on your hormones.”

Lockett put his left hand under his thigh to keep from doing something magic by accident. The nurse was taking off her blue gloves incredibly carefully. “Do you want to talk to somebody,” she said, not quite looking at him. “Like a counselor.”

“I don’t have anything — ” he started, but then she looked at him, and so he couldn’t finish, _I don't have anything to talk about_.

“You should think about it,” she said. “Okay? It could really help.” Then — this was the worst thing yet — she pulled over her chair so that she could sit beside the exam table and look directly into his eyes. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

It was like every time they knew you wanted this to be over more than you had ever wanted anything except heroin, and, because of that, like to punish you, they kept finding reasons to keep you there. “Sure,” said Lockett, kicking himself.

“You were taking AZT two years ago. What happened?”

Shouldn’t this be on the fucking clipboard? “The nurse said something about low blood cells.”

“Yeah, that’s common. It’s not very effective on its own, anyway, AZT.”

It was also astronomically expensive, and, as such, it had been a lot easier to buy drugs and forget about it.

“There are a lot of new drugs being developed,” the nurse went on. “The virus learns and changes. So we have to keep finding new ways to fight it. Not every way works for every body, every infection. Are you following?”

“Is there some new pill you want to give me?”

The nurse reached behind herself for her clipboard and handed Lockett a glossy little pamphlet she'd tucked beneath whatever notepaper she was using to record all the various and sundry specifics with regard to the sleeping dragon. “It's a clinical trial for something new,” she said. “It’s a form of treatment called a protease inhibitor.”

The pamphlet was just full of pictures of people smiling. “What does it do,” Lockett said.

“Same as AZT; it stops the virus from replicating, but at a different stage of infection.”

The people in the pamphlet were so incredibly happy that it struck Lockett as objectively hilarious. When they had posed for the stock photos, they must have had no idea they would wind up in a minimally informative one-pager about a novel treatment for HIV. On each fold was a couple of mixed race and/or gender laughing together beside some extremely vague large text. There were no single people. Everybody looked happy and there was skin on their bones. It was like nobody knew — or maybe everybody knew, but nobody wanted to admit — that half the people who had AIDS in the first place were junkies.

“Lockett,” said the nurse, noticing that he wasn’t really reading, just staring at the pamphlet in rapidly magnifying, confusing rage, “you’re an ideal candidate for this. Your infection is moving very slowly, but it won’t forever. This could prolong the latency… theoretically indefinitely. You could have a normal life. And because this is a clinical trial, you could contribute to the development of a drug regimen that could save millions of people’s lives. The lives of people not even born.”

This sounded like a rehearsed spiel, so he particularly hated that it was mildly compelling. “But what about — ”

“ — lycanthropy?” The nurse shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Maybe minor blood clotting issues. We can work with that.”

Lockett’s head was spinning. “Okay,” he said.

“You just think about it, okay?” The nurse briefly put her hand on his knee and then took it away. “Let me know next time you come. Next month, the thirteenth, right?”

Outside it was raining that clammy August rain. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but the humidity was sticky and heavy and dark, seeping through skin to gum up the workings of the bones. To the west, over the peninsula, the clouds were lifting just enough to show the stems of the mountains. Lockett had nothing else to do and didn’t particularly want to go to the Den or Apparate back home to Riggins to sit in the trailer by himself, so he walked down toward the water, which appeared from up on the hill as a strip of silver refracting the low clouds.

A little voice in the back of his head which had sounded like Devon’s voice for many years but sometimes sounded like Graeme’s voice these days said, _She’s trying to tell you you could live past thirty-five, man._

He ended up going down to the pier by the ferry terminal and watching the huge boats go in and out. The clouds separated for a minute so that the late-summer sunlight dropped a strange chain into the water, and then they socked in tightly again and the rain dragged a sheer gray veil over the sound like a movement between dreams…

It was obvious what he was going to have to do from here: When he had been given the choice to live before, he had always taken it.

After a little while he walked up Madison to Capitol Hill, where he turned up Broadway, thinking he’d go to the Paradiso to wake himself up with coffee before Apparating back to Idaho out of the alley in the back. When he turned onto Pike, Kyla was coming up the street. She looked damp, and exhausted, likely having been waiting tables since dawn, but she also looked happier to see him than any human being had a right to be. She stood on tiptoes to hug him. And he hugged her back. She was warm and her frizzy hair smelled like weed and lavender incense and her leather jacket creaked. It really could be that easy sometimes.

“Man,” she said, pulling away, “where have you been?”

“Idaho.” He couldn’t help smiling at the end of the word. After all, it was hilarious. “My mom died in January, and I inherited her trailer and her pickup truck and fishing stuff and all the Idahoan particulars.”

“I didn’t know that!” She shoved him a little playfully by the shoulders. “I’m sorry about your mom, but man, Idaho? For real?”

Lockett laughed. “Yeah. For real.”

She looped her arm in his like a fifties prom date and they went together back up Pike to the Paradiso, where Kyla slipped inside, sweet-talked the barista, and came out with two coffees. Hers was straight black. She had taken Lockett and Graeme’s orders often enough at the diner to know that Lockett liked his own coffee with sacrilegious amounts of cream and sugar.

“So if you live in Idaho now,” Kyla said, slurping a sip of her coffee, “for whatever ridiculous reason, what are you doing here?”

“I had an appointment.”

“An appointment for what?”

Lockett shrugged. “Weird and difficult and overwhelming and fucked up and strange and good news.”

“Well, congrats I guess,” Kyla said. “What are you going to do about it?”

He smiled at her, raising an eyebrow. "Ky, I don't even know what I’m going to do this afternoon."

She leaned back in the rickety wrought-iron chair, wrapping her hands around her mug. A few of her rings had oxidized greenish against her fingers in the omnipresent rain. “Yeah,” she said, “I'm not the best at planning for the future either."

"I thought you guys were finally going on tour."

Kyla shrugged. "That was the plan."

“ _Was_?”

Her expressive face changed shape into something baroque and melancholy, like a symbolist painting. "Actually," she said, “it does feel a little kismet that I ran into you today. Because there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."

“What is it?”

“Remember — you know, I hadn't realized until recently that it was the day Montclair died. At the diner.”

He had never quite figured out how people expected him to act when they brought up the auspicious fact that Montclair was dead. Kyla seemed a little apologetic for invoking the specter of the memory, which was probably about the last thing she needed to feel. Lockett felt sorrier that Wray was dead, that being after all the original antecedent of the events of that day. “I guess it was,” he said.

“I guess I wanted to ask you if your offer still stands.”

That day was kind of a blur. He had really felt like he was floating. That was pretty fucked up, wasn’t it? He remembered hauling Graeme around like Virgil probably did with Dante in hell in the beginning, and then kissing him on the cheek for some reason. He had nearly forgotten about it, but he had also asked Kyla —

“You mean starting a band?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I mean, obviously it would be sick if Graeme — ”

“He’s in London.”

“I know, I saw _T.M.M._ like everybody and their mom. And I laughed for an hour, then I put it on the fridge." She shrugged. “You and I can make more than enough noise on our own.”

“Drums?”

“I have a drum machine for now. I was going to talk to Kevin, but he moved to Anacortes…”

This wasn't necessarily surprising; drummers in the Seattle wizarding scene tended to either die or move away with disconcerting regularity. Once, Wray, in the transformation cells in the morning gingerly eating stale doughnuts, had joked that Devon had started it. “It's a curse he put on all of us,” he’d said. That was before he’d thought to recruit Marsden out of the Denny Academy jazz band to play in Crucia. 

They were both on edge that morning because Montclair hadn't showed up the previous evening, all but guaranteeing that they had some new twisted sibling somewhere. Or a corpse to take care of. On these types of mornings there was a particular furrow in Wray’s brow that would only smooth over when they went outside and Graeme was there waiting for them, looking hungover and concerned, and not mutilated in a ditch somewhere. “Devon couldn’t’ve cursed a fly,” Lockett had told Wray. “Not just because of the hippie bullshit. He also was no good at magic.”

Wray laughed, but then he winced. One of his pale, brutalized hands strayed tremblingly toward his ribcage. He had done a really incredible job pretending he was anything other than in constant pain. He was so good at it that — like a tremendous actor — you would have never noticed it if you didn't know it was there.

“What about Liz from Kelpies?” Lockett asked Kyla.

“Liz is pregnant — did you know that?"

“Wait, what? No! Really?"

“I guess maybe she could do a Maureen Tucker thing… What about Lawrence?”

Lockett only had to marginally play up his instinctive shudder of disgust. Lawrence was the worst and anyway he and Royce had started a terrible harsh noise project. “If I’m never in another band with Lawrence again, it'll be too soon.”

“It’s like there are drummers everywhere when you don’t need one," Kyla mused, "and then the minute that you do…"

“We should just jam, just us, just to see, you know, and then we'll figure it out," Lockett suggested. "But wait, is Splanchomancy breaking up?”

Kyla proceeded to detail the Fleetwood Mac-esque interpersonal drama that had derailed her band’s second album and planned tour. “The album’s still coming out,” she said, thankfully — the songs were so good Lockett found himself thinking about them sometimes while he was fishing or in the shower or trying to fall asleep, even after hearing them just a couple times at shows. “The label, Skookum — well, Chris and Scott — already sent the vinyl to the printer and duplicated hundreds of tapes… So we’re on the hook for that, at least.”

“You don’t want it to be released?”

“I’m at the point with Layla and Josh that I resent them both so deeply for ruining my songs and breaking my heart that I think the record should be burned on a pyre. But I was outweighed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I know you know how shitty it feels. Montclair can’t have been the easiest person to play in a band with.”

Lockett recognized archeological techniques for drama excavation, but there couldn't really be much harm in that. Sometimes it kind of disturbed him how many people in their scene seemed to remember Montclair fondly. “You’re telling me,” he said.

“It should be the opposite, then,” Kyla said, leaning back in her chair and digging for her cigarettes in her coat pockets. “Zero drama.”

“Are human beings capable of making art together without drama?”

She cocked her eyebrow up her forehead, and, meaningfully, offered him the last smoke in her pack. “Wanna find out?”

\--

After tea, Flora brought Sal and Graeme to the door, the way her mother had always done with guests, exchanged cheek kisses, watched them part ways at the end of the path through the front garden and disappear into the darkness. When she got back to the kitchen, Imani had put the kettle on and was absently shuffling the deck of cards with which they’d played a few rounds of low-stakes poker. “I thought you were going to tell them,” she said.

This was quite frankly ridiculous. “I thought you were going to tell them!”

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Imani lied. Flora had gotten to know the way her face twisted when she lied. She rarely did. In fact, she usually only did by omission, the way she had that evening. “We were having such a nice time.”

Flora sat down across from her at the kitchen table. Imani took the note out from the front pocket of her overalls and unfolded it carefully, like it was hot, smoothing it out on the table and setting it between them as though only together could they neutralize its significance. “They could have made it fun,” she said, “and used cutouts from the _Prophet_ and women’s magazines like a normal psycho.”

The note had been slipped under the curtain at D&R as the last notes of Saint Rose’s encore had died away, echoing under the soaring ceiling as the stage crew slowly brought the lights up and the crowd started shifting toward the exits and out onto the street in the cool summer night. A couple notes had made their way under the curtain, along with a few flowers and rudimentary bouquets and an antique gold brooch in an old velvet ring box; most of them were pretty standard fan mail, the kind the Hobgoblins had once gotten care of Amortentia, except those letters had rarely been addressed to Imani or Flora. This one was, or perhaps it was addressed to all four of them, by a not-so-friendly collective appellation.

_You cunts had better stop what you are doing before somebody gets hurt_.

“It’s probably just some… jealous little man,” Imani said. “Who would we be if we let jealous little men tell us what to do.”

“Mani,” Flora tried, “it’s a bit of a credible threat.”

“What do you think we should do? Take it to the MLE? Get their penmanship expert to take a crack at it?” Imani shook her head. “They’ll laugh us out of the building.”

“We should at least tell Evvy and Croydon and the boys,” Flora explained, though this had been her position since they had discovered the note in the box of fanmail and strange gifts one of the stagehands from D&R had brought over the evening previous. “If it implicates them, they have a right to know.”

“Flor,” Imani said, eyes following Flora as she went to the stove to take the howling kettle off the heat, “I’m telling you it’s nothing.”

“No you’re not.” How was it that they had known each other all these years and yet still it was easiest to tell her things like this not looking directly at her? While making her a cup of rooibos chai in her favorite mug with a little honey? “In fact, you’re telling me that you’re very scared.”

Imani groaned. “Flor — ”

“What about a compromise?”

“What about it?”

Flora passed Imani her mug and sat up on the counter, holding her own teacup carefully against her chest. “Just tell Evvy. Tell her you don’t want to make a big deal out of it but just in case…”

Imani’s brow furrowed. “What could she possibly do? Hire… invisible security?”

“She’s a Muggle-born club owner on Knockturn Alley,” Flora reminded her. “I’m sure she has some tricks up her sleeve.”

Imani sighed. “What if we're making something out of nothing?”

“What if we’re making nothing out of something?”

Imani turned and looked up at Flora on the counter, studying her carefully, the way she always did, not like a painter looks at a muse but like a painter looks at a painting. “I only don’t want you to regret this,” she said.

“I mean, better safe than sorry — ”

“I mean all of it,” Imani said. “I mean the record, the residency, the tour, the whole thing.”

Sometimes it upset Flora, the way she showed her love by worrying. But only sometimes. “How could I possibly regret it?”

Imani looked across the room, chewing her lower lip. It was a rhetorical question, but anyway the answer was either nothing or unthinkable.

Flora got down from her perch on the counter, set her teacup on the table, and knelt on the cool tiles at Imani’s feet. “We’re young,” Flora reminded her. Imani scoffed. She looked like she was going to say, _Not as young as we used to be_ , so Flora kissed her knee. “Beautiful…” And her other knee. “In love…” And then inside of the first knee, which Imani had carefully, judiciously separated from the other. “In the best band in the world…”

\---

\--

-


	4. 4.

**4.**

\--

Saint Rose’s residency at Dyatlov and Roswell was Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights through August, 1992. On his days off Graeme wandered East London — parks, pubs, bookstores, charity shops — swam with the old men in the mornings in the pond in Victoria Park, having been up all night playing guitar, went around Imani and Flora’s in the evening for tea and dominos and an occasional jam and a black cab home past midnight. There was one secondhand shop around the corner from his flat where he went just about once a week in search of strange things to wear onstage. He hadn’t worn the dress again, opting instead for Wray's too-short suits with threadbare Seattle band t-shirts and the big Doc Martens and some of Flora's costume jewelry, supplemented with finds from the charity shop — an oversize off-white wool cardigan with a floral appliqué crookedly decorating the back, outré eighties acid wash jeans, an oversize suit coat in which he felt he could attempt to channel David Byrne in _Stop Making Sense_ , desert boots, a ladies' black silk camisole. One Tuesday afternoon he was crouching in the back of the store to look through the old lady sweaters on the bottom rack when he heard the nervousest conceivable peep go “Graeme?”

It was a cadre of teens who stepped back when he looked up, all trying to hide behind each other. They were dressed in muted stripes and hand-me-down jeans, Converse or Docs, boys with long hair, girls with shaved heads, all of them with at least one mismatched earring. They would’ve fit in just fine in Seattle or Olympia, Graeme thought. “Hi,” he said.

“We were at the first Saint Rose show — ”

“ — we’ve seen you come in here — ”

“ — Neera’s mom works across the street and — ”

“ — bought the Crucia LP at Bad Magic the other day, it was the last one they had — ”

Of everything they said that last detail was the most unbelievable. He hadn't even known that any record stores in London carried the Crucia self-titled.

“ — will you sign this?”

“ — and we have something for you.”

He was presented with two _Severe Asceticism_ cassettes, a copy of the Crucia LP on vinyl, two ticket stubs from D&R, and a cardboard shirt box. From over the kids' shoulders, Graeme could see the twenty-something Muggle clerk watching them with extreme bemusement.

“Um,” Graeme said, accepting the box, “I haven’t got a pen or anything.”

One of the long-haired boys ran up to the cashier and took one from the counter. Graeme proceeded to sit down on the floor and sign everything while the kids hovered over him in anxious glee. It was almost funny to see the Crucia record in such a removed setting: Cal’s greener-than-green painting seething on the front like the spring rainforest, and the portraits of all five of them on the inside cover. Wray looked like an angel. Alex looked like an avenging warrior. Graeme thought he looked sleepy. Probably he'd just been drunk.

The girl who’d given him the record to sign crouched on the floor by his side. “I love the paintings,” she said.

“Our friend Cal did them. And the cover too.”

“And the back?”

“That's our house in Seattle — I mean, Alex and Mercedes live there, and Wray used to live there, and I — well I guess when I’m in Seattle I live there… we just painted the song titles on the window. Listen, I didn't even know they sold this in this country.”

“They did,” said one of the boys. “It was in _W.R.W._ this week that Sub Sub Pop has to do a new pressing.”

Graeme paused halfway through signing his name under his portrait. “Wait, what?”

The kid shrugged. Graeme’s heart was in his throat. Alex hadn’t mentioned anything about that. In their infrequent phone calls, when they spoke about Sub Sub Pop, which was even more infrequent, it was only in recognition of the unfortunate fact that Crucia were supposed to put out another two records. Mike and Meg were too polite to hound Alex about it, but she’d told Graeme that Mike had started coming up to her at shows, attempting to casually shoot the shit as awkwardly as was possible, and finally rolling around to “So, you been writing songs?” It was difficult to say whether the second pressing development boded well or poorly for future conversations with the label. Sub Sub Pop were not necessarily known for their cash cows — until, maybe, now.

“You guys actually listen to this?” He couldn’t help but ask the kids this dumb and desperate-sounding question. “You’ve heard our album?”

“Everybody has — ”

“Jessie's brother had a copy before any of us knew you were in Saint Rose — ”

“— what’s ‘Monkshood’ about?”

“— are you going to record another one?”

Cal had really painted Wray so beautifully. That was perhaps the nicest thing he’d ever done. He had refused to let Graeme see the portraits before they were finished. And when he had come over to show them to Graeme and Alex and Mercedes and Marsden, along with the new green cover, Graeme had taken one look at them and gone outside to have a cigarette, even though he didn't smoke. Or, didn’t smoke very much. “I take it you meant yes,” Alex had said when Cal left. “We told him yes.”

Through the soft-focus veil of reminiscence he noticed one of the kids elbow their friend who had asked about another Crucia record. It was almost funny. Nobody in the Seattle scene, and certainly none of the scant press the Crucia LP had gotten, had been shy about evoking the looming specter. In fact, Graeme would rather have answered that question than the one about “Monkshood.” “It’s okay,” he told the kids. “I think we will. I hope we will. I don’t really know.”

He handed the record back to its owner and looked up. “Open the box,” said the shyest girl, hanging at the back of her group of friends.

Graeme did. Inside, in a neat little nest of white tissue paper, the girl had very neatly folded a floral cotton dress with oversize lapels and a few pearly buttons dipping under a shallow v-neck. It was probably from another charity shop — the tag was frayed and unreadable, and the fabric was soft with age. “Wow,” he said, trying to look the shy girl in the eye. She was bright red. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

“It made me think of you,” she said.

He didn’t know why he thought he might cry. “Do you guys want to come see us again?” he asked. “I’ll put you on the guest list this weekend.”

He wrote their names down on the back of some liquor store receipt paper from his jeans pocket and shook their hands and they went running elatedly out of the shop. After all that he felt he had to buy something, so he picked out a decent flannel and brought it to the register.

“Are you in some baggy group or sommat," said the clerk, looking him up and down as she rang him up.

“Something like that…”

He wore the floral dress on Saturday and got his picture in the _W.R.W._ Gigs of the Week section with the caption _GENDER CHAOS: the guitarist Gram Sugarbush of Saint Rose rocks your grandmother’s secondhand duds at Dyatlov & Roswell_. At least they spelled it like Gram Parsons, but it was the last time anyone ever got his name wrong.

\--

They had the first week of September to rest — Imani and Flora went to the seaside, Sal back to Dublin to see his parents, and Graeme took the train to the place everybody recommended when he asked about green and mountains, the Peak District — and the second week to rehearse before the U.K. tour that would make up most of the next month and a half. They learned another cover — Magazine’s “Rhythm of Cruelty” — and the Hobgoblins’ “Black Magic,” tightened up some of the jams and codas that had been hard to pull off live, and succumbed to the _Quibbler_ ’s request for an exclusive. “At least it’ll be interesting,” Imani had said, shrugging; indeed, just about every other outlet that spoke to them asked a handful of perfunctory questions then desperately wanted to know 1) if the girls had written off a Hobgoblins reunion, 2) why Graeme sometimes wore dresses on stage, and 3) absolutely nothing from Sal.

The journalist who normally covered music and culture for the _Quibbler_ , Naomi Arthur-Zzyzx, had been sent on urgent assignment to Nottingham to report on a cursed marimba, so they were obliged to speak with a bona-fide eccentric who insisted on meeting in a dark, smoke-filled teahouse off Hampstead Heath (paralyzingly close, even Graeme knew, to the Boardman family townhouse on Western Road where the Hobgoblins had first rehearsed), and that they call her Zazu. She also insisted on speaking to each of them separately at first, and that they each draw a tarot card before the interview began. The final piece ran in the October 1 issue of the _Quibbler_ , as the band drove out to a wood just west of London to perform the first gig of the tour at the three-hundred-eighty-ninth annual North Riding Festival. In the coming years, it would be cited for its eerie prescience, and numerous nineties wizarding rock fans and scholars would try to get in touch with Zazu, who was clearly a masterful tarot practitioner, only to find that the _Quibbler_ claimed it had never employed anyone by that name.

_Imani Rose, vocalist and organist, twenty-eight, from Tottenham, London, via Accra, Ghana, volunteers to speak to me first, then slips her fine-boned, beringed hands into her lap as soon as I place the tarot deck on the table. “I’m not superstitious,” she explains, once the waitress has stopped by and taken her order for a pot of rooibos chai._

_“It’s not superstition.”_

_She gives me a diplomatic smile. “Don’t you think that's subjective?”_

_“No.”_

_“I was never one for divination,” she says. “Never really wanted to know.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“You're full of questions!”_

_“Imani, this is an interview. If you won’t draw a card, at least tell me why.”_

_She sighs, folding her arms thoughtfully over her chest, and thinks for a moment, well-kohled eyes searching the smoky cobwebs in the room’s high corners. “I suppose I believe that what’s supposed to happen will happen,” she says, “regardless of what I know, what I do. I can only be confident that I’m living my life in the way that I’m supposed to. I don't trust a card — or a crystal ball, or tea leaves — to tell me differently. You feel me?”_

_Flora St. James, vocalist and bassist, twenty-eight, from Durham, gamely splits the deck, lacquered lips in a red line, and draws the Tower. As she lays the card on the table between us, beside her teacup, brimming with aged Earl Grey, her steely expression betrays nothing at all. “Change,” I explain. “Sometimes, a disaster can bring change. Other times, even a negligible change can be a disaster.”_

_Flora sighs, settling back in her seat. Onstage, she dresses in square-shouldered suit coats and layers of jewelry, stands with a boyish glam in three-inch vintage stilettos, and cranks her bass amp to eleven. The cumulative effect is of a woman who transcends even the cliche “larger than life.” In person, her shoulders are narrow and her pale eyes evaluate her surroundings with a cool suspicion, but the gravity of her presence is luxuriantly undiminished. “Disaster,” she echoes, raising a radically ungroomed eyebrow._

_“Well, not necessarily — ”_

_“I’m cool with disaster.” She takes a sip from her teacup, leaving a crimson lipstick print on the chipped rim. “Any disaster would be better than our last one.”_

_Graeme Sugarbush, guitarist, twenty-two, from Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., orders black coffee, not tea, and draws from the deck the upright Three of Swords. “That looks bad,” he says, running his fingers over the pierced heart. To me, his accent sounds laconic; his voice is young and jovial; his deep brown eyes bely unmeasured depths. To watch him wrestle with his instrument on stage feels like witnessing the early birth of magic, or sound, or the first time a human being ever tried to eat an oyster. He must be desperate: does he not know — or care! — that it could kill him?_

_“Does it frighten you to hear that grief is coming?” I ask him._

_He levels me with a genuine, surprising grin. “No. Not at all.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“We’re old buddies,” he tells me, tucking the card back in the deck. Then, trying to convince himself as well as me: “There’s nothing grief can do to me that I can't survive.”_

_Saladin Abidi, known as Sal, drummer, thirty-one, from Lucan, County Dublin, Ireland, draws the Two of Cups, reversed. “Ah,” he says, sipping from his mug of mint tea. “Disharmony, withdrawal.”_

_I’m mildly surprised that Sal, of the four members of Saint Rose, is the only one to whom I don’t have to give a Tarot 101. “Does that upset you?”_

_“I’m a noise musician,” he smiles. Prior to Saint Rose, he played in the Holyhead-based duo Crushing Valerian, a pagan drone ensemble likely familiar to readers of this paper — they appeared regularly through the eighties as “sound bath” practitioners at the Shropshire Hills Vernal Bacchanal. “I’m well accustomed to disharmony.”_

_“And what about the rumors surrounding your practice of necromancy?”_

_He laughs loud enough to have the Muggle ladies who lunch sending us filthy looks. “I haven't done that since I was fifteen,” he explains. “Now I just try to play the drums loud enough to wake the dead.”_

The rest of the interview was presented as an uneditorialized conversation, so that fans have in some cases debated who exactly said what, accompanied by line drawing portraits of each member painstakingly created and animated by the _Quibbler_ ’s 92-year-old veteran cartoonist, Oskar van der Stijl. 

_“Imani, Flora, you played in one of the best-loved U.K. wizarding groups in recent memory — ”_

_“Oh, Zaz, not you too…”_

_“It’s almost funny how it's the only thing anybody wants to talk about. Especially because, when we played in the Hobgoblins, nobody ever wanted to know anything about us at all.”_

_“Well, how does it feel to be out on your own?”_

_“Intense.”_

_“Vulnerable.”_

_“Visible?”_

_“… Vivacious? Verdant? Verisimilious?”_

_“In the Hobgoblins, even when we wrote songs for the band, usually we wouldn’t sing them, or we would sing them with Jack and Ra— Stubby, and we didn't always write lyrics, and anyway, nobody was looking at us.”_

_“Something about that was a little freeing…”_

_“Yeah, something else about it was a little suffocating…”_

_“Being out in the front, you know, I suppose it’s the same. A little freeing, a little suffocating.”_

_“We’re lucky to have Sal and Graeme, who are great musicians and performers. When we’re on stage, the attention seems to be spread out across the four of us.”_

_“Sal, Graeme, you’ve played for years in indie groups. Sal in Crushing Valerian, of course, a favorite of our readers… Graeme, I refrain from saying the name of your band because of its proximity to an illegal curse.”_

_“Well, in America those curses are unregulated. It's like saying the word fuck. I mean, you vaguely know you’re not supposed to, but… Very different from here, where people — not just you — sometimes hesitate to say our name. Can I say it? We’re called [ REDACTED ].”_

_“Have you ever seen anybody perform it?”_

_“The curse? Yeah, I have.”_

_“And — ”_

_“Well, both the curser and the cursee are dead now. They got each other in the end, you know, if not directly.”_

_“Sal, I’m sure everybody asks you about Crushing Valerian’s connections with the occult, particularly necromancy…”_

_“Well, we always avoided press, so not really. I will say, conclusively, in the pages of this august periodical, that I have no connections to necromancy or any vaguely necromantic activities in any way, shape, or form…”_

_“What about the coded messages in the_ Witch of Endor _cassette?”_

_“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean. Listen, the only way to make a living as a necromancer is to be a cop. Do I look like a cop to you?”_

_[ The band exchange delighted laughter and knowing looks. ]_

_“Well, tell me about the dynamic between the four of you.”_

_“Oh, we’re like family now.”_

_“Do you fight?”_

_“Like siblings, sometimes.”_

_“How does the difference in your ages — ”_

_“Well, Graeme is the baby, and we all look after him — ”_

_“ — when I want to be looked after!”_

_“ — which is rarely.”_

_“I think we all fight for how we want the songs to sound. Sal and I know — we’re usually pretty good about deferring to Imani and Flora, because they wrote them.”_

_“Only pretty good?”_

_[ A wash of nervous laughter. Nobody wants to answer this question. ]_

_“Girls, why the boys?”_

_“Have you seen them play?”_

_“… Is that really it?”_

_“I knew the first time that I met both of them, Sal years ago, Graeme… hardly more than a year, that we would be friends for a long time.”_

_“How did you know?”_

_“Some things — I don't know. Some relationships, friendships, you know, are just… alchemy.”_

_“All of us — everything we’ve ever done is living proof of that, I think.”_

_“Sometimes I worry that we're telling the same story over and over again. But then I listen to it, and it sounds good. And that’s what matters. Maybe we have to tell it over and over again, until everybody hears us.”_

\--

The North Riding Festival had been situated in a clearing in a dense wood near a town called Ruislip for almost four centuries. Certainly four centuries ago, long before the relentless suburbanization of the towns around London had stretched creeping tendrils all the way out here, it had been a great deal easier to hide an outdoor gathering of thousands of witches and wizards and any and all loud noises, including distortion, feedback, fireworks, shouting, cauldron explosions, dragon fights, broomstick jousting, et cetera, stemming from such an event. It was like nothing else Graeme had ever seen before. It probably wouldn’t have even been allowed to happen in America and indeed appeared to be hanging on to its concealment from Muggle society by the barest fingernail. They were obliged to wait on the side of the highway to get into the parking lot for ten minutes while a handful of harried twenty-somethings ran desperately up and down the shoulder to maintain the bewildering array of obfuscation charms concealing the line of cars from Muggle drivers, cyclists, and passers-by. Down the road, the festival organizers had set up a decoy construction site in order to block off the southbound lane, but it appeared that this was only serving to piss Muggles off.

Inside a powerful perimeter of magic, they were directed to the backstage area, greeted by some stoned hippies whose ability to be in charge of anything, let alone an entire three-day music festival, seemed suspect, reminded that their set time was 8:30 promptly, and handed a veritable arcade reel of drink tickets. The sky was miraculously clear for England October, sheer clouds stretching a pale screen across the sun, and the breeze moved the old, tangled pines, and onstage a jam band played the same riff over and over and over again for about two hours. There were thousands of people spread out across the great lawn, some scattered in colorful islands with blankets and lawn chairs, others crammed like sardines against the barrier between crowd and stage. In the edge of the trees, some people had set up tents to camp for the night; others had laid up against the ancient trunks and passed out; others were brazenly selling drugs of both Muggle and wizarding persuasion. Colorful frisbees and flags aloft on the autumn breeze. Everywhere laughter, kegs, cigarettes, spliffs and pipes, bucket hats, mud-hemmed jeans. Vendors were arrayed around the perimeter selling dramatically overpriced food, and, thank heaven, booze.

Sal and Graeme promptly cashed in a handful of the drink tickets on a signature festival cocktail that had purportedly been concocted since the 1780s, which was bright purple, put off a kind of dry ice vapor, and supposedly had the power to “streamline your energy” and “empower the soul.” Then they were obliged to tape an interview and a quick set — Imani had vehemently nixed the initial suggestion of an acoustic set — for Wizarding Public Radio. Bootlegs of this brief performance, the first Saint Rose recording to feature Sal and Graeme, later could fetch good money in the classifieds in the back of _W.R.W._ and _T.M.M._ They played “The Girls,” “I Was Also,” and, with all four of them singing together in gleeful, sloppy harmony, an impromptu cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now,” which remains to this day the only known recording of Graeme Sugarbush singing.

In the dusk, Graeme wandered on the great lawn, sipping another one of those very potent purple cocktails until he was obliged to lie on the ground and watch the stars turning on, like lanterns on faraway porches. Someone close by was smoking a joint. Someone a little further was blocking his view of the brightly-lit stage by dancing in frantic gyrations. Eventually he asked someone what time it was, and, when they said it was eight o’clock, asked them to help him up. Of course, Saint Rose didn't end up going on until nine, on account of the previous group taking forever to set up and then insisting on their full sixty-minute set time. When Graeme made it to the wings of the hulking, hollow stage and settled beside Imani and Flora to tune his guitar, the girls were in the middle of a conversation that started with “ — can't believe it.”

“Can't believe what?”

Flora put her hand out, so Graeme put the neck of his guitar in it, watching a kind of static shock pass through Flora's face. Sal had privately asked him what kind of magic he’d done to the guitar, because none of them could stand to so much as hold it for more than a few minutes. “Go take a look at those chodes,” Flora said.

Indeed, on the walk backstage, Graeme had been laughing to himself (something to do with the streamlining of his energy) about how flat and fratty and point-blank boring the group on stage sounded, and how hilarious it was going to be to dramatically upstage them. They were five white guys with moderate talent and an un-stage presence that suggested they were too cool and heterosexual to perform in any traditional sense of the word. The singer was prematurely balding, though he'd tried to hide it by combing his hair artfully. Graeme tended to feel bad for people like this. They were just so overwhelmingly pathetic. He went back over to Imani and Flora, accepting his guitar from Flora. “So?”

“We used to play in a band with those guys,” said Imani, raising an eyebrow. “Well, the singer and the two guitarists.”

“No way — really?”

“That's how we met. Imani was drumming, and then they kicked the bassist out, and I had a class with Alan, the guitarist who can actually play… I wonder if they still call themselves Draught of Living Death?”

So people wouldn't say or even print the name Crucia, but Draught of Living Death was okay? “When did you guys quit?”

“Just about as soon as we found another band to be in. Which was basically about two months later when we heard Jack and Ras on the radio.” Imani shrugged. “I didn't know they were still making music.”

Sal appeared suddenly from the darkness as he was wont to do, clattering his drumsticks in his hand. “Somebody said Amortentia just signed these wankers.”

Imani and Flora burst out laughing. “Wait,” said Graeme, “ _what_?”

Saint Rose were waiting in the wings when Draught of Living Death came offstage. Imani offered the singer her hand to shake, except that he took it and kissed the back of it, and then leaned uncomfortably close to her — Graeme watched every muscle in Flora's body go tense — to whisper something in her ear. He ignored Flora, Graeme, and Sal, and disappeared backstage. The rest of the band went past them as though they weren't there, except for the drummer, who met Imani’s eyes and casually slipped his hand across his throat.

They stood there in a state of shocked bewilderment. Imani’s face went through several phases of rage. Sal, once he’d collected himself, took two big vengeful steps after the drummer before Imani stopped him with her hand wrapped around his elbow. Then she said, in careful, even tones, “Graeme, come with me to the van.”

It brokered positively no argument and he wouldn’t’ve made one anyway. He handed Sal his guitar (Sal promptly leaned it up against some of the stage rigging) and set off after Imani. Even though he was maybe eight inches taller than her, he was practically jogging to keep up. “Is he following us,” she said, when they were halfway across the parking lot.

Graeme threw a kind of radar ping of magic and listened while it came back to him. There were at least three people having sex in their cars in a nearby radius, but no pursuing wankers. “I think we're in the clear,” he told Imani.

At the van he kept lookout, seeking moving shadows in the silvery moonlight, while she went through her things, found her _Fear of a Black Planet_ shirt, and changed into it. “Want to wear one of my dresses?”

“I have my own!”

Imani kept watch while he put the green one on. Evvy Mitchell of D&R and Hellfire Club had given it to him on the last night of the residency; it was kind of an old-lady depression-glass chartreuse color, silky polyester, with long sleeves and pearly plastic buttons. He had only put it on once before, to see if it fit. There were some bruises on his knees of perhaps obvious provenance, but that probably worked as part of the look.

On the way back across the parking lot Imani linked her arm in his like they were the nightmare version of an old timey couple going to the prom. “If we’re going to be very different,” she said eventually, “then I want to be _very_ different, you know?”

“I get it. You don’t have to explain that to me.”

“I suppose I tend to like rubbing things in people’s faces. Sometimes it really seems like the only way they’ll get it.”

“You should shove your tongue down Flora's throat onstage,” Graeme suggested. Imani elbowed him, but, indeed, she did. Drought of Living Death were nowhere to be seen. Someone later said they had gone home early. The crowd screamed loudly enough that the stage manager let Saint Rose go on for two encores, so that they had to play “Here She Comes Now” again because they had run out of songs.

They played headlining gigs in Brighton, Plymouth, Bristol. Dipped into Wales to play Cardiff, headed north to Birmingham. Eventually had to stop listening to the wizarding radio, which seemed to play nothing but the Draught of Living Death debut single, “Fancy Tarts.” Switched to the Muggle radio, which played Blur, Inspiral Carpets, PJ Harvey, James, Lush, the Sugarcubes, XTC…

On October 8th it had been two years to the day since Wray’s suicide, and Saint Rose played in Liverpool. Starting at about noon that day, Sal had started taking Graeme's drinks away from him, probably thinking he was being slick or that Graeme was too drunk to notice, though neither of these things were true. That night he wore Wray's black suit with the big lapels, played more violently than he really had known he was capable of, and left the venue just about as soon as the curtain fell at the end of Saint Rose’s encore, so that he didn’t have to talk to anyone about it. The cosmic arbiters, whoever they were, pressed play on the customary dismal videocassette tape: strange pub, strange bed, still drunk at dawn, semi-lost in the ancient, tangled streets, basically driven near to tears by the fact that everything was named after at least one of the Beatles. Started thinking about that one McCartney song about Lennon — “And if I said I really knew you well what would your answer be if you were here today?” — and then all hope was lost. Eventually he found the hotel near the venue where everybody else was staying and couldn’t bear to go inside and explain to the wary receptionist actually yes I was supposed to be here last night but I, you know, had to go through the yearly reenactment of my grief odyssey… Instead he sat outside on the curb, watching the light arrive in the city like an unexpected visitor, all the sleeping life slowly waking up, lights in windows, buses and taxicabs on the street, until the waitress unlocked the front door of the diner across the road and he went in for a cup of coffee. It only took about twenty minutes — he had half fallen asleep with his head against the window — before Imani came in, settled down across from him in the booth, and wrapped her warm hand around his wrist.

The waitress came over, refreshed Graeme’s coffee, and poured a fresh mug for Imani. “And a full English,” Imani said, “please.” She looked Graeme over. He must have been a sorry sight because then she said, “Make that two.”

“Mani, I really don’t know — ”

“You’ll feel better when you eat.”

He remembered Lockett telling him that two years ago in the diner on Capitol Hill, and then he remembered, at some point the evening previous, hexing the two-way mirror in his pocket so that he wouldn’t hear Lockett’s voice coming out of it anymore. Though whether that’d really been happening or otherwise was just a kind of wishful drunk hallucination was uncertain.

“Sal told me,” Imani said. “What yesterday was. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorrier.”

“Don’t be. Can you play like that every night?”

He looked into the surface of his coffee. The round distortion of his face and extremely filthy hair in the pale morning light. It had been an incredible relief to plug in his guitar and pour everything into it. Pull it out of himself, look it in the face. It wasn't so very scary when you looked at it head-on. It was only very sad, and very loud, like a lost ghost. It felt like it asked him where to go, except he couldn't possibly tell it, because he didn’t know. He couldn’t send it away. It was just there in the room with all of them, howling, screeching, clutching at the dregs of life… and then he had to shut it all down and shove it back inside his chest again. It had felt at first like his heart might give out. “I don’t think so,” he told Imani. “I don’t think I want to.”

“It’s alright. I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

The waitress, in loading up the pie stand behind the counter with fresh banana cream and key lime and peach, had switched on the radio, and it played “Hey Jude.” Was Liverpool just like this? Graeme pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Under the table, Imani’s shoe brushed his. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked gently when he looked up.

He heard Wray’s voice in the back of his mind: _It’s your Capricorn moon_. “I don’t want to — I don’t know, um, burden the rest of you…”

“It’s not a burden to ask for help.”

“Well, I…” He had to stop and take a kind of stabilizing breath, and in doing so realized he couldn’t articulate exactly what it was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just — I’m sorry.”

“Graeme.” Imani reached across the table again. This time, her hand carefully slotted into his open palm. “I want you to stop saying sorry and hear me, okay? Because I'm only going to say this once.”

He braced himself. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Okay.”

“The thing is that — this sounds harsher than I mean it. I don’t need you. I want it to be you — but I don’t need you. Do you understand?”

He nodded. He was biting the inside of his lip hard enough to taste blood. But he knew it was true — he would have said it himself.

“We all have our own… injuries,” Imani went on. “Old wounds, you know. I don't know that you need to overcome them. I don’t think some of them can be overcome. But you need to find a way to live with them, alright? And I tell you this because one of my own old wounds is watching my friend self-destruct. I’m not watching it again. And I’m not trying to fix it again when it's not on me to fix. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Right on time, the waitress deposited in front of each of them a large plate upon which numerous unidentifiable meat items, baked beans, a scorched tomato, toast points, eggs, and a pile of mushrooms had been meticulously arranged.

“Now eat your bloody breakfast,” Imani said.

They drove to Manchester that afternoon, then Leeds, where Flora's mother came down from Durham to drink red wine with them backstage and watch from the wings in a state of gleefully embarrassed pride. Graeme spent an entire sleepless night trying to un-hex the two-way mirror before giving up and spending no doubt astronomical sums in long distance charges on the hotel room telephone with the operator fruitlessly attempting to be put through to anyone with the surname Schaff in western Idaho. Finally, a week or so later in Edinburgh, one of the stage crew at the venue recommended a repair shop in the wizarding district in New Town. He waited for about an hour in his downtime in the midafternoon, bouncing his knee, looking around at the shattered broomsticks and cracked cauldrons and bent wands similarly-misfortuned Scottish wizards had brought in to be fixed, whilst the proprietor and just about everybody else who worked in the shop took a look at the two-way mirror. “What the hell did you do to this thing,” the proprietor asked eventually in his nigh-incomprehensible Scottish accent, ringing Graeme up for twenty galleons. They hadn’t managed to fully fix it — “It might be literally impossible” — and the screen still showed empty silver-black, but Graeme was assured that he would probably be able to hear “whoever's on the other end” speak through it, and they might be able to see his face. Which basically made it a glorified telephone, but no matter. His heart was in his throat. He went around the back of the repair shop, had a long sip from his flask, sat on the cool ground, looked into the emptiness for two steadying breaths, and then he said, “Lockett?”

It took him a minute, and then, from the other end, tinnily, as through a bad connection, he heard, “Graeme? Are you there?”

“Can you see me?”

“Kind of — like a really staticky VHS or something. What happened?”

“I, um, broke it… I’m trying to fix it. I can’t see you but I know you’re there.”

He kicked himself at how stupid that sounded. “I tried calling you last week,” Lockett said.

“Oh,” Graeme lied, “really? Sorry… I guess I didn’t hear it.”

“Right. Alex and I — well we just thought we should check on you. On the eighth, you know.”

“Right. Um, thank you.”

Graeme could see in his mind’s eye the laconic little shrug Lockett did when he wanted to pretend something wasn’t a big deal. “It’s a hard day for everyone,” Lockett said. 

Graeme thunked his head back against the wall. He knew when he was being set up. “The show was alright,” he said. “We played in Liverpool at this old pool hall… The local paper said we sounded like Throbbing Gristle.” They’d also called his stage presence “funereal” and his solo on the set-closing “Sound and Fury” “unlistenably painful.”

“Did you do any Beatles stuff?”

“Yeah, Sal insisted we drive by John Lennon’s childhood house.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah.”

He imagined the conversation he’d rather be having:

_I don’t know why I keep doing these terrible things to myself. I understand that I’m basically sabotaging myself, you know?_

_How about you just stop? If you don’t know why, it can’t be that important._

_I’m scared of what it would mean._

_What_ what _would mean?_

_Accepting that I deserve to be loved._

_But you already are._

“Graeme?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you hear me? Sorry — you cut out for a second or something.”

“I didn’t hear you. Say it again?”

“I just asked if you were okay.”

It was easier to lie when he couldn’t see Lockett’s face and knew Lockett could barely see his face. “Not really,” he said. “But I will be.”

“Graeme — ”

“I will be. Listen, Lockett, I have to go — soundcheck, you know.”

That bitter pause. Like an underripe blackberry. “Right.”

“Talk to you later?”

“Sure. Bye, now.”

“Bye.”

Around the corner from the venue he stopped into a Muggle pub and had two shots of good scotch whiskey, so that when he joined the rest of the band onstage for soundcheck the place where every bad feeling lived was neatly bandaged over. They spoke to the Edinburgh wizarding paper, the _Paisley_ , in Imani and Flora's green room afterward, and nobody passed him a Tennant’s from the cooler, so he went down to the bar while the Sluagh played and had more scotch. He had done this before — it was an easy vice to hide, if you were trying — but it would take a little while to get used to again. He'd spoiled himself, with nobody knowing, or at least with nobody looking.

They played in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Inverness, where it was bitterly cold, and a group of teenagers waiting outside before soundcheck gave Graeme some photocopied zines, a demo tape, and a moth-eaten vintage wool cardigan. And then, over the course of a long day, they drove south then west across Wales all the way to the village of Holyhead, Sal’s onetime stomping grounds, to catch the ferry to Dublin in the morning. They slept over that night at the sprawling farm owned by Cameron Tower, Sal’s partner in Crushing Valerian, and his wife Kelly and their two kids, Sal’s goddaughters. In mid-1995, Crushing Valerian (namely Cameron, who had rediscovered the masters while cleaning out his attic; by this point Sal had long since fled the U.K.) released two-hundred copies of a cassette titled _CV and Guests Oct. ’92_ , a two-hour jammy drone thought to feature contributions from Imani, Flora, and Graeme, as well as Kelly Tower on bassoon and the girls on pots and pans. Graeme barely remembered that night; he had been at the Towers’ potent homebrew and woke up on the couch at 3am embracing his guitar like a lover. And at five-thirty they were obliged to drag their sorry selves into the van to put it in line for the eight AM boat across the Irish Sea.

Dublin was enough like and unlike Seattle that the sight of it scored deeper into the wound of the unspeakable homesickness. Luckily, there was also Guinness. Sal, Moira, Kel, and Meabh were greeted variously as the heroes of a liberating army or as irredeemable sellouts, especially considering the laughable Britishness and Americanness of their tourmates. Saint Rose played at Newgrange with two local openers so that by the time they went on at midnight the air was thick and tight with pot smoke, everybody was drenched in sweat, and Moira had to be pulled away from a near-fistfight in order to take her place sitting on a cinderblock in front of a rudimentary mixing board. Sal had apparently decided to show up all his detractors by playing like Keith Moon. Graeme thought it was the best show they played on tour, and said so the next day in the van through the crushing hangover, only for everybody else to roll their eyes and gaze desperately out opposing windows.

Belfast, Galway, Cork. Wounded cities, border checkpoints, castles and churches and dark shuttered institutions in a state of mossy ruin, and the wind, wind, wind. Sheep on the narrow roads — more than once somebody had to get out of the van and shoo them away— and nuns in quiet cliques on the city cobblestones in the silent foggy morning. The roiling grey sheet of the ocean from the high cliffs howling desperately against the bluff. It was the most beautiful place Graeme thought he had ever seen, except that he noticed the way Sal and Moira looked — like they were returned to the ancient birthplace of their immortal souls and couldn’t wait to leave. On the first Monday in November they took another ferry from Rosslare Harbor to Fishguard, Wales, all of them seasick to various degrees in the strong gale, and then they drove home to London on the M4.

And that was the U.K. tour finished. Graeme got in the door of his flat in the early afternoon, dropped everything on the floor in the kitchen, rolled a joint with the flakes of very stale weed left in the mason jar in the milk crate by his bed, and sat in a hot bath until it got cold. Then he slept for a day. At last he felt vaguely human enough to begin to address the problem of laundry, except that he fell asleep again at the laundromat, staring into the riot of his clothes in the dryer until the movement hypnotized him into eerie dreams, and the proprietor woke him up just before ten, apologetically, because they were requiring to close.

In the mirror in the bathroom at home — home!? — he thought he looked older, sharper, narrower. He had another joint in the bath, jerked off unsatisfyingly in the dark, stared at the tiled ceiling. Started thinking about the dryer again. Not that life generally wasn't a kind of fucked up spin cycle, but living like this made it run fast and backwards for a while, then cut you loose to stagger blindly and dizzily like a newborn ungulate into the human world…

\---

\--

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the music from chapters 3 and 4 [here](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/644099500559990784/saint-rose-and-the-thorns-fluorescentgrey)


	5. 5.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm aware that i said i would post this incrementally but i realize i am just emotionally tormenting the six people who care... including myself, because i just want to share this and get it out there! so here we go... it's a neverending march miracle

**5.**

\--

Graeme, considering himself sufficiently recovered from tour after a week of sleeping twelve hours a night, answered the summons to Imani and Flora’s place on Belgrade Road in the early afternoon on a Tuesday. A week was the longest he had gone without seeing the rest of the band since February, which was a vaguely disconcerting fact, especially given he kept looking for them whenever he turned around. He had spent most of that time asleep. There had been a strange 48-hour period when he hadn’t even touched his guitar. He had gone to the grocery store on the corner and impulsively bought a lot of green vegetables and fruit, only to realize he had no idea what to do with them. He had called Alex for advice only for her to laugh hysterically at the fact that he had willingly purchased kale.

“It’s not funny, Alex,” he’d said, but he was laughing too, “what the fuck do I do with it.”

“Just cut it up into bite-size pieces and cook it with olive oil and garlic and salt — just a little salt! — in a pan until it turns bright green. Not very long.”

“Then what?”

“Then you eat it.”

“Just like that?”

“I dunno, put it on rice or something!”

He did know how to cook rice, provided it was the microwaveable kind. “Okay, I can do that.”

“How was tour?”

“Well, now I feel like I didn't even notice I was running and then somebody told me I could stop running. But it was — I dunno, Alex, it was a great adventure… but I kind of hardly remember it.”

Days, nights, clubs, fans, highways, fields, the same handful of songs on the Muggle radio, “Moving on Up” by Primal Scream, far and away across the endless rolling soybean farms in the grey fog the eerie ghostly shapes of those chalk images carven into the hills… Rain smearing the window of the van, cities, hotels, flats, pubs, bedrooms, dreams, the church spires rising out of the clumped and huddled villages toward the mist, the songs, the noise, interviews, photographs, handshakes, a filthy makeout in an elevator, full English breakfast, tea, coffee, gin — every day being a fucked photocopy of the previous day, some information lost, new information added.

“I really think you would like Ireland if you went there,” he told Alex. “That’s the big takeaway… what about you, how’s home?”

Home?

“Got a solo gig,” Alex said. In the background, Graeme could hear kitchen sounds, rain… Maybe she was making cookies, or running the washing machine, or Mercedes was vacuuming, or the street sweeper was going by… “At Alki Gallery next week.”

“No way, Alex, really?” He hadn't known she was even thinking about playing live by herself. That was probably on purpose. “That’s amazing.”

“I have a twenty minute set ready. It might be unlistenable.”

“I kind of hope it is.”

“Well, I’ll see if Lockett can tape it…”

Thinking about the two of them together without him made something deep in Graeme’s chest turn cold and start hurting. What would they talk about, standing out on the street after, sharing a joint? Sometimes the homesickness started feeling like grief and the grief started feeling like homesickness. Graeme eyed the half-empty bottle of gin on top of the fridge. “I’d really like that,” he said. “Listen, Alex, I have to cook this kale before I chicken out.”

“Right — well, I’m honored that you asked me. I hope it’s good.”

“I know it will be. Let me know how the gig is?”

“Yeah, of course. I miss you.”

“I miss you too. Like the Slint song…”

Hanging up the phone felt like closing a door. Now that he'd evoked Slint, he couldn't not put them on. He’d found a cheap tape player at a charity shop before tour and had purchased only the cassettes that were most urgently necessary, _Spiderland_ obviously being among them. He put it on, made a gin and tonic, and semi-successfully made himself a bunch of kale over rice for dinner. It was actually really not that bad.

When this record had come out, in March 1991, Graeme had gone to the record store on Broadway to buy it, and then he had walked down the hill to the Den to listen to it on Lockett’s record player. If he had known what the experience was going to be like he never would have agreed to listen to it with another person, especially not Lockett. They sat there together on Lockett’s bed in the windowless little room, volume on the record player cranked up as loud as it would go, sharing a joint. Whenever Graeme came over, Lockett always hid all the works for shooting heroin under his bed. It was unclear what the significance of this was, if any. Sometimes, if the light in the hallway moved just right, you could see the glint of the sharps in their little tin next to his hiking boots in the shadowy darkness. Eventually Graeme got up and started pacing. At first Lockett just watched him, and then he sat up on the edge of the bed bouncing his knee anxiously. The music was so incredibly frustrating and unsolved-seeming that they could both understand there was something else coming for which they could not adequately prepare themselves. And at last it arrived. “I'm sorry — ” their eyes met for a brief instant of shared terror — “and I miss you…” One stage of the grief died violently and another was born anew, like a phoenix. Graeme went home feeling scoured raw and stayed up for about forty-eight hours teaching himself to fudge the guitar tone on “Nosferatu Man” until Alex put lovage in his tea.

So he supposed he was always letting music take the place of time. Or music was how he knew time was going by: music was an expression of time, and yet it collapsed time… And every time you listened to the same song, you were a different person.

Maybe it was a kind of exchange, he figured, getting up halfway through “Good Morning Captain” to turn the tape off. On tour, they gave that gleeful escape from time to thousands of people every night. They kept none for themselves.

It being November in London, the rain had gotten quite cold. Some days the sun didn't seem to fully come up. Graeme had planned to get back to his routine of swimming with the old men in the pond in Victoria Park — the customary crew of white-haired pensioners was still out there every morning, despite the downturn in the weather — but he’d gone down on the weekend and put a toe in and immediately bailed. Nevertheless, he walked across town to Imani and Flora’s, stopping to pick up the new _Melody Maker_ and a coffee and a box of discounted day-old pastries.

Flora came to the door when he rang the buzzer of the house on Belgrade Road. “Why do you always insist on getting wet?”

“Sorry — I mean, it’s really not that bad out there.”

“Just make sure you shake in the foyer,” she said, passing him a hanger for his coat. “Like a wet dog.”

Graeme smeared the rainwater off his face with the sleeve of his damp flannel. “Of course, mom.”

In the kitchen, Imani was sitting up on the counter. One of the chairs at the table was pushed out, so that it was clear Flora had gotten up from it to get the door. In the other chair sat possibly the most beautiful person in the world. Lots of artfully sloppy dishwater hair, cornflower blue eyes, one of which drifted ever inwardly toward the aquiline nose. He wore a black turtleneck and cranberry corduroy overalls, and he’d left his shoes by the door, so that Graeme could see the hole in the heel of his wooly houndstooth sock. This was Rastaban Q. Boardman, better known to the wizarding world as Stubby, best known to the girls as Ras. Graeme realized belatedly that he had frozen in the threshold like a mannequin in a vitrine.

“Ras,” Imani said, edge of laughter in her voice, “this is Graeme Sugarbush…”

Ras offered him a modest corner of a smile and a handshake. Graeme stumbled forward and took it. The heavy, antique silver ring Ras wore on his middle finger, probably hundreds of years old, was cool to the touch. And looking into his eyes was like gazing into an M.C. Escher print until reality started fragmenting. “Charmed,” Ras said. His voice was musical and yet posh and/or medicated enough to sound perpetually bored.

“Me too,” Graeme managed, “wow, um, hi.”

“I’ve heard great things,” Ras told him, unbelievably, “in more ways than one. They’re always playing that ten-minute version of ‘I Was Also’ on WPR…”

Graeme was mildly surprised that WPR found any time to play any Saint Rose songs around aggressively shilling for the new Draught of Living Death record. He was even more surprised that Ras could stand listening to that song, given what it was about:

_Open wounds, they tend to fester  
_ _And love is grief’s closest ancestor  
_ _Bitterness, it tends to sharpen_  
_But I was also in the garden  
_ _I was also in the garden_

He was either violently clueless or violently self-aware. Either would check out with the scattered, depressed, exhausted individual Imani and Flora had described when they dared to touch on Hobgoblins politics: a whole entire actual laughing and suffering human person when removed from his popular conception as a beautiful and insane semi-celebrity.

“Thank you,” Graeme told him sincerely. “That one was really a, um, team effort.”

“I’m envious of you, getting to play with the girls,” Ras said. “And I’m envious of the girls, getting to play with you and Sal.”

Graeme had to quickly bite his tongue on something along the lines of, Why don’t you come over and sit in with us sometime? “We have a good time,” he said instead, somewhat inanely.

The teakettle boiled, Flora made a pot of Earl Grey, and they retired to the living room. Ras, slouched elegantly in one of the chintz armchairs, held his dainty floral teacup like he had been born to do such a thing. “Well,” he said, “there is actually a favor I wanted to ask of you all.”

Imani and Flora exchanged a meaningful look. Ras noticed it, swallowed it, digested it. Graeme felt like he was watching a soap opera.

“What is it,” said Imani warily.

“Should we wait for Sal?”

“He went to Holyhead,” Flora said, shaking her head. “It’s his goddaughter’s birthday.”

“Oh, right. How old are Cam’s kids?”

“Rory’s five today, and Lila’s almost three — Ras, out with it, come on.”

“It’s nothing so bad,” Ras said. “It’s a benefit show. I’m offering you a show.”

Imani groaned. Flora guffawed. Graeme was overwhelmed. “You couldn’t’ve just said that right off the bat!”

“Jesus Christ, Boardman, we thought you were about to ask us to… reunite the band for a fucking acoustic set.”

“No!” Ras practically shouted. “No, no, no, no, no. No! Not without Jack. Besides, fuck an acoustic set.”

“What’s the show,” Graeme asked. “When is it, where is it?”

“It’s a benefit to raise money for an AIDS ward at St. Mungo’s,” Ras explained. “The wizarding hospital in London. It’s long overdue, but they say they can't afford the expansion, which is ridiculous because they are a for-profit company and the CEO makes millions of galleons per year… but I digress. I said I would match whatever we raise via ticket sales and donation buckets and all that out of the Boardman coffers. And my sister agreed, which means we can actually, um, liquidate the assets.” Imani would later explain that the Boardman family trust had basically cut Ras off after he had been institutionalized for the second time, following the disastrous failure of his first solo album. “Evvy said we can do it at D&R on December 12th,” Ras went on. “Hopefully we’ll have you four, I figured you can help me talk to Moira and see if we can get the Sluagh, and I’m in talks with the Weird Sisters…”

“You sure you don't want to get Draught of Living Death?” Flora joked. “Really rake in the big bucks?”

Ras made a sour face. “Who do you think I am? I’d rather open the show myself with a solo nails-on-a-chalkboard set.”

Laughter was diplomatically exchanged. Graeme refreshed his cup of tea and went around topping off everybody else’s just for something to do as a trespasser into a decade of history.

“So you’ll do it?” Ras half-asked, bracing himself, after a moment’s awkward silence.

Imani looked to Flora, then to Graeme. She would’ve said yes, Graeme understood, even if she'd seen otherwise in their faces. But she wouldn’t've seen otherwise in their faces. “Of course we will,” she told Ras. “Of course.”

\--

The next time Graeme called, Lockett was in the practice space under the fetish clubs on 10th Avenue with Kyla, just jamming on a riff cribbed from Wipers’ “Return of the Rat.” It had gotten to be so that he hardly had to hear Graeme’s voice on the other end of the mirror to know he was there: the room felt heavier and closer, like some third presence had stepped in the door unseen. Lockett stopped short in the middle of a transition that felt like it could bridge verse and chorus, letting the entire song clatter to the ground, and Kyla emerged from her rhythmic trance like a sleeper from a strange dream. Unfazed, the little drum machine went on puttering away in the corner. “Sorry, Ky,” Lockett told her, “give me a second, don't forget that…”

There was a room at the end of the long, cavernous hall where everybody smoked, but Ross and Giles were in there. “Dude,” Ross said, eyes cherry red with the effects of the monumental spliff he was clutching, “It’s been forever, what's going on?”

Lockett remembered suddenly that Ross, despite his perpetually stoned nature and the fact that he still lived with his mom, was a great drummer. “Sorry guys, I have to go outside for a second, but I'll be right back, don’t go anywhere, okay?”

By the time he heard Ross say, “Sure thing, dude,” he was halfway up the stairs to the street, and he could hear Graeme’s voice from his pocket. He always said Lockett’s name kind of apologetically. Listen, Lockett had thought about saying, if I didn't want to carry this dumb thing around with me, I wouldn't be doing it. For some reason it was really difficult to say this kind of thing to Graeme’s face, or not his face — the staticky faraway mirror-image of his face, now that he had fucked up the mirror.

He ducked into the alley behind one of the clubs, crouched behind a dumpster, and pulled the mirror out of his pocket. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said Graeme. He sounded apologetic about the fact that he sounded relieved. “Are you on Cap Hill?”

“Wait, can you see me?”

“Kind of… I worked on it for two and a half hours today; it's better than it was.”

“How did you even fuck it up in the first place?”

“I put a hex on it.”

“What kind of hex?”

“Beats me… can you see me?”

“I can see the outline of you.” Dark hair, white shirt, shoulders. A vague suggestion of the mismatchy shapes of his strange face and his brown eyes. “And yeah, I’m on Cap Hill. Down in the practice space with Kyla.”

“She finally went for it!”

“Yeah — we don't have a drummer but… I have an idea.”

“I’ll play drums when I come back.”

“I didn't know you played drums.”

“Yeah, I mean, not well… How’s it going?”

“Well, this is only the second time we’ve played together, but I have bits and pieces, she has bits and pieces, you know, just a matter of stitching them together…”

“What about Splanchomancy?”

Lockett was obliged to tell him about all the drama surrounding Kyla’s band breaking up, which, in recent weeks, had somehow compounded further. “It’s kind of nice,” he concluded, “not living here anymore, missing all the… incestuous infighting.”

“I kind of miss it.” _Because you live for drama, Graeme,_ Lockett thought. “I miss all of you guys. I miss you! I miss that stupid basement.”

“Well, it’s stupider than ever,” Lockett said. “Kyla always says the metal guys are finally taking acid.”

“That sounds like a psychedelic nightmare.”

“Well, you know, everything is…”

Lockett knew he was in trouble because his brain was playing Galaxie 500’s “When Will You Come Home.” He imagined the conversation he’d rather be having:

_Why can we never say anything to each other?_

_Because the truth is embarrassing._

_How do you know that? When neither of us can admit what the truth is?_

_Not knowing the truth and not admitting the truth are two different things. And, in this case, both are embarrassing._

_But why does it have to be that way?_

_I don’t fucking know, Lockett, why are you asking me?_

“I met Ras Boardman the other day,” Graeme said, thankfully interrupting Lockett’s weird reverie with the sheer incongruousness of this random non sequitur.

Lockett had never really been a Hobgoblins fan. By the time he and Montclair had discovered that wizarding music existed, and that most of it sucked, the Hobgoblins had been mildly outre among the punks. “Cool,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re too punk for the Hobgoblins… the point is, we’re playing this benefit show he’s organizing, with the Weird Sisters…”

If the Hobgoblins were not punk enough, the Weird Sisters were definitely not punk enough. “Cool,” Lockett said again. He would have buried his eyes in the palm of his hand were he not unsure how much of his face Graeme could see.

“It’s a fundraiser,” Graeme went on. He must, based on the circuity of the conversation and the reedy tone his voice got when he was nervous, have been coming around to some vaguely concerning point, and, indeed, here it was, right on schedule: “A fundraiser for an AIDS ward at this wizarding hospital…”

Lockett managed his third and possibly most forced and pathetic “Cool.”

Graeme waited for an excruciating count of five seconds for him to say something else, and, when he didn’t, promptly started talking really fast: “So that’s what’s next, then, I don't know, we tour Europe, maybe…”

Lockett’s brain was filling in possibles. I’m happy for you, I miss you, on the subject of AIDS I’m going to be in this clinical trial which probably means I’m going to “live” or whatever so you can stop prematurely thinking about me when you listen to Slint’s “Good Morning Captain,” I miss you, I miss you, [anguished screaming] I miss you…

Instead he said, “That’s great.”

God damn it!

“Listen — ” kicking himself — “Kyla’s waiting for me, and — ” kicking himself — “I have to go ask Ross to be our drummer.”

“Ross!”

“Yeah, Kevin moved to Anacortes.”

“Can you scrape him off his mom’s couch?”

“He’s down in the smoking room right now.”

“Well if he's ambulatory you’d better go and get him!”

Even the dim and formless suggestion of Graeme’s wobbly little smile was too much to be beheld head-on. Lockett managed a hasty goodbye and shoved the mirror in his pocket. His heart was beating really fast for some reason. Down in the smoking room Ross and Giles had moved on to a second (possibly third) drooping blunt. Out of nowhere Lockett remembered a flash of a memory that Wray had called them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Of course, if anyone was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern it was himself and Graeme (Wray obviously being Hamlet, Alex probably being Horatio, if Lockett remembered ninth grade English well enough) except that they could never seem to say a single thing to each other…

He was obliged to exchange back-slapping embraces and fist-bumps with Ross and Giles, and, finally, dutifully, accepted a hit from the giant, disgusting blunt. “Ross, honestly you could do me a favor,” he said.

“Dude, anything,” said Ross. “What is it?”

“Come on and listen to what me and Kyla are cooking up?” And, because you couldn’t have one without the other, even though he was violently clueless and wouldn’t be of any use whatsoever, “You too, Giles…”

In the practice space Kyla was fiddling around with the bridge of one of her songs, which she called “You Give Me Clinical Depression.” Lockett met her raised eyebrow with an expression he hoped communicated, _I'm really sorry, but what other option do we have?_

“Ky,” Giles said, picking his way across the room to the cooler where he somehow knew they kept the beers. “I was so sorry to hear about — ”

“It’s all good, Giles.” Then, even though he clearly hadn’t needed to hear this, becausehe was already separating a Olympia tallboy from the ring in the cooler, “Help yourself.”

“The Splanchomancy record’s legit,” Ross noted, checking out the drum machine. “Scott gave me a messed-up tape, so I only have side A.”

“Well, fuck you then, Ross, because all my songs are on side B.”

“You guys aren’t going on tour, are you?”

“No, instead we’re going to have a big cage match…”

“Mud wrestling?”

All of them, even Ross, stared Giles down with utmost contempt he appeared not to register whatsoever. He toasted in Kyla’s direction, sloshing a splash of pale beer on Lockett’s amp. “I’d pay to see that!”

In the resulting monumentally awkward silence, Kyla ran a finger down the E string of her bass and gave Lockett a look like a simmering teakettle. Thankfully, Ross straightened up, surveyed the scene, and made a brilliant and timely observation: “So you guys are jamming, huh?”

Lockett put his guitar strap back over his head and checked the tuning. “Want to sit in with us?” Kyla asked.

Matters progressed. The most incredible thing about all of this, Lockett thought, about forty-five minutes in, even more than playing with the best bass player he had ever met, was that he could hardly recall the last time he had felt this much joy playing music with other people. There was a kind of gleeful electric current jolting through all his blood and bones. Maybe the last time he'd felt it was way back in the day with Devon, playing Minor Threat songs in that little room in the sprawling shack outside Ketchikan. Since then, joy had been about the last thing he was doing this for. How incredibly sad, he thought, watching and listening from somewhere outside himself as his hands followed where Kyla and Ross pointed, up these mountains, through these tunnels, into the dark, into the light…

About two hours later, Lockett and Kyla said goodbye to Ross and Giles at the corner of Pine and walked together down the hill to Linda’s. “That wasn't as bad as I thought it would be,” Kyla said. “Especially after Giles fell asleep.”

“Ross is a great drummer,” Lockett told her. “Everything else about him is in a state of arrested development.”

“Basically encased in weed resin like one of those ancient beetles trapped in amber…”

It was that kind of rainy day when the mountains were not visible but could nevertheless be sensed on the horizon, vengefully holding the clouds over the city. The front windows at Linda’s were totally fogged up with condensation, but the place was nearly empty except for some Muggles in the back corner and the bartender, Jennie, who, completely unprompted, kissed Kyla’s cheek and mixed her a gin and tonic with two lime wedges. “And for the gentleman?”

“Just a Rainier.”

They sat together in the window at the end of the bar. Linda’s was one of those establishments where the veil between worlds felt pretty slim and porous. For instance, Jennie knew Kyla played bass in a band called Splanchomancy, had probably even heard their records, and was always asking Kyla for details on when they were playing live, which Kyla could never tell her for fear of violating key tenets of the federal magical constitution. One of the other bartenders, who everyone was pretty sure was a squib, sometimes played the Crucia record at full volume over the PA. Once Lockett had been sitting in the backyard with Graeme and a very shy Muggle teenager who had definitely not been of drinking age had come over to ask a series of very detailed questions about what pedals Graeme used on “The Mirror.” Watching Graeme drunkenly trying to answer this question when the answer was “an antique Boss DS-1 and nuclear quantities of magic, yes, literal magic” had seemed like the most hilarious thing ever.

Lockett later figured he must have had some special face he subconsciously put on when he was thinking about the obvious. Because: “How’s Graeme,” said Kyla, like she was asking about the weather.

“Fine,” said Lockett, setting about gulping his beer in order to marginally distill the awkwardness of this situation, promptly realizing the irony about halfway through and almost choking.

“Is he really?” Kyla mused.

“I honestly don’t know.”

“I was gonna say.” She bit into a lime wedge. “That would really be news.”

One of the Muggles had gone to the jukebox in the corner by the kitchen. Lockett watched the slouched flannel shape queue up a dollar's worth of whatever indie and grunge and classic rock cuts would impress his friends or otherwise provide a kind of fifteen-minute psychoanalytical self-concept. Inevitably, cinematically, the needle dropped on Sonic Youth’s “Sugar Kane.”

Lockett finished his beer. “It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind,” he said.

“What? Talking to Graeme? Why?”

“I have no idea, Ky, does anybody who loses their mind know why or where it goes or anything?”

On the jukebox Thurston was singing: _kiss me like a frog / and turn me into flame…_

“You’re a good friend,” Kyla said. Meticulously, with her pointer finger, she was drawing a heart in the condensation on the window.

“I dunno. Am I?” 

Kyla filled in the heart carefully, until, through its soft lens, they could see the concrete and the wet street outside. Footsteps, tire treads, needles in the gutter. “I don’t know, Lockett,” she said, “you are to me.”

\--

You would have never known that the Hobgoblins and the Weird Sisters had once had a kind of adversarial relationship, watching Ras, Imani, and Flora greet them backstage at D&R on the evening of the benefit show. Sal and Graeme watched the proceedings with removed intrigue. “It's probably easier now that they’re not in competition or whatever,” Graeme noted.

“Maybe.” Sal sipped his Guinness. “Wagtail also nearly died last year and, consequently, almost quit music forever. So maybe he's had some kind of epiphany about being kind to your fellow man.”

Ras was in a vibrant mood and a black suit that had probably cost more than Graeme’s monthly rent. It was possible that he was just that delighted the show had sold out. Otherwise, maybe his therapist had upped his anti-depressants. He waved Sal and Graeme over and introduced them glowingly to the seven Weird Sisters, even though it was all moot because Sal had met them all before (though perhaps none of the involved parties remembered this, it being at a particularly memorable or unmemorable year in the mid-eighties at North Riding Festival when someone had spiked the drinking water with LSD) and Graeme had co-owned all their records with Wray since they were twelve years old. Wagtail did look thinner than Graeme remembered from pictures of the band he’d seen before, and drawn, like somebody had rubbed an eraser over him until he lost a layer of saturation. “Can't wait to see you four play,” he said, shaking Sal and Graeme's hands. “My kids are obsessed with the record. And they made me order away to Seattle to get the backordered Crucia LP from Sub Sub Pop.”

Wray would have positively spontaneously combusted if he were alive to hear this. “You could probably get your hands on all the Crushing Valerian tapes a lot easier,” Graeme pointed out.

Wagtail waved a beringed hand. “I already have all those. Well, all the ones my kids haven't already run off with…”

Unbeknownst to Wagtail, his children, Elise and Darrell Opondo-Wagtail, had pocketed many of his highly valuable tapes, including some of the rarest Crushing Valerian and Hobgoblins recordings, duplicated them with an old device they’d gotten at a Muggle charity shop, returned to their father the less high-fidelity duplicates, and brought the originals to Hogwarts to listen to with their friends and further bootleg into copies that circulated the school throughout the 1990s and were frequently confiscated as contraband.

At 8pm promptly, Ras opened the show with a brief greeting and reminder to give generously at the donation buckets. Flora sighed in relief when he traipsed offstage to polite applause. “I was terrified he was going to feel good enough to bust out the acoustic,” she whispered to Graeme from their vantage point in the balcony.

Double Double, an unsigned, scuzzy power pop quartet that reminded Graeme of the Posies, were on first. Then the Sluagh, then Saint Rose. Because of the four-band bill, they only had an hour, so they played about half of _Severe Asceticism_ , including a ten-minute “Sound and Fury,” and the “Life’s What You Make It” and “Rhythm of Cruelty” covers. They were getting good enough at playing the Hobgoblins’ “Gravesend Rag” and “Black Magic” that Sal had argued for one of those too, but Imani had nixed it. “Feels weird to think about singing them in front of Ras,” she said, even though they knew he had come to at least one of their August residency shows.

They were getting really good at this, Graeme thought in the heady effervescent moment when everything else dropped out of “I Was Also” and he let the distortion roar in and stagger through the cavernous room like a drunk. Light from the balcony washed the floor and in some corner of his mind he processed the thousands of upturned, moonlit faces watching him, and that they were all different. Adoring, thrilled, confused, blank. Some watched his face, some watched his hands. Some watched the space around them as though they could visualize the thing he couldn't see but knew was there… Some didn't watch him at all. Some had their eyes closed. The noise lifted them up and buoyed them somewhere else. He played for those people and those people alone for a couple heartbeats of violent stillness. And then he heard Sal thunder back in, Flora’s bass cues seeking method in the madness, and he corralled all the noise under Imani with the chorus, nearly two thousand voices shouting with her, _I was also in the garden_ …

Coming offstage, they were obliged to walk the gauntlet of all seven Weird Sisters and Ras offering congratulations and handshakes like an opposing youth soccer troupe. Wagtail clapped Graeme’s shoulder with a mildly disconcerting fatherliness. “The guitar tone is wicked,” he shouted in Graeme’s ear over the roar of the crowd. “Just brutal.”

Wray would have just about died of jealousy. Maybe it was the fatherliness, but Graeme was tempted to just tell Wagtail everything: I had this friend, he loved your music, he died and now I make a living playing the sound of my suffocating grief… Then Ras hugged him, a warm and tachycardic and patchouli-scented hug, and Graeme's knees buckled.

After the necessary glad-handing, Graeme found the nearest men's room, shoved his head under the sink, and went down to his green room for a drink. One drink turned into three, at which point, as was customary, he got the two-way mirror out of the pocket of his coat hung on the back of the door and sat at the vanity sipping gin from his flask whilst spinning it in his fingers. On the other end of it Lockett was probably fishing with his neighbor or jamming with Kyla or Alex or making a snack or hiking or watching TV… normal human things in the normal human world. Graeme hadn't quite yet managed to fix the visual reception, which was twisting the knife deeper by the day. How could anybody possibly want to see somebody’s face so badly when the sight of it caused him nothing but excruciating torment? More pathological yearning that could only be fixed with judicious application of gin…

Upstairs, shaking through the floor, Graeme heard the Weird Sisters’ guitar tech checking Tremlett’s iconic Stratocaster. He knew he had better go up there to watch, because they had been very kind, and because he wouldn’t've put it past Wray to somehow reach out of the afterlife and shake him, hard, if he passed up this opportunity. He was wrapping the two-way mirror back up in its protective handkerchief to hide it in his coat pocket again when there was a knock on the door.

Outside in the hall were two kids, dressed to the nines. They must have been about fifteen years old. Though they were obviously twins, the boy was taller, or else this was the optical effect of his impressively teased afro. “Have you seen Myron Wagtail,” said the girl.

“Have I — Wagtail?”

“He’s our dad,” said the boy, with a note of embarrassment.

“He’s about to go onstage,” Graeme said, watching the kids exchange an expression of dread. “Wait, is everything okay?”

“We found something,” the girl said. “Something bad.”

“Something bad?”

“A Dark magic thing,” said the boy.

They didn’t look much like Wagtail but they had a similar breed of intensity that was difficult to argue with. “Are you serious,” said Graeme.

“As a heart attack.”

“Okay.” He swallowed. His mind was racing about as fast as it could under the intoxicated circumstances, filtering a series of potential horrors that could be encompassed under the nondescriptive phrase “Dark magic thing.” Maybe this wasn’t a good idea, but it was his first idea: “Show me?”

They went walking quite quickly together down the narrow hall. “My name’s Graeme,” Graeme told them.

“We know.”

“I’m Darrell, and that’s Elise.”

“Well, it’s great to meet you both…”

The kids led him down a staircase he didn’t think he remembered ever seeing before, deep into the underbelly of the venue, where, decades or even centuries ago, they had probably loaded in blindfolded dragons and other magical creatures for horrible cryptozoological shows. They were probably twenty feet or more below the street now, deep in the guts of the city of the Romans and the War of the Roses, plague pits, Bronze Age travelers… Years upon decades upon centuries of evil magic had been performed in this place; Graeme could feel it. It was crawling over all his skin. When he spoke, it swallowed and choked the sound of his voice. “What were you guys doing down here?”

“There's a back door,” Elise said. “It goes into the basement of the art shop. Some of our friends, uh — ”

“We paid off the shopgirl,” Darrell admitted.

“You guys shouldn't come down here,” Graeme told them, even though he understood being told not to do something by a semi-adult probably would make them want to do it even more. “Get your dad to put your friends on the guestlist.”

“He said we could only have one!” Darrell protested, but then Elise threw her arm across Graeme’s chest.

The hall dead-ended in an empty room, painted a kind of mental institution blue, smelling like disinfectant, feeling like death. There was a narrow door in the far wall, presumably the secret way into the art shop. “What is it?” Graeme asked. “Where?”

Elise pointed down, and Graeme saw it. It was a pile of trash on the floor, except it wasn’t.

“It’s worse than it was,” Elise said.

“It’s — how so?”

“It’s… hotter, D, it’s hotter, right?”

It wasn’t so much that it was hot, but there really wasn’t another word to describe it. It was radiating something that was uncomfortably, blisteringly palpable. Graeme looked to Darrell, who he could already tell was the more evenly keeled. “It’s hotter,” he agreed.

“Okay,” Graeme said, “well, it’s probably good that you got, um, an adult.”

The kids both looked at him as though something about this statement was objectionable. To be fair, it seemed that way to Graeme too. “What even is it,” Elise said.

“I don’t really know,” Graeme told them. He took a step toward it, and, of course, Elise and Darrell did too. “You guys ought to stay right here. Better yet, stay in the door. You can do a shield spell, right?”

Darrell said, “We don’t have our wands,” at the exact time that Elise said, “Why can _you_ go near it and we can’t?”

“Because we have no idea what it’s going to do.”

Darrell stepped back toward the door, pulling Elise’s arm, but she wouldn’t go. “What are you going to do,” she said.

“Put a box around it.”

“You can do that?”

Graeme shrugged. “We’ll see.” He crouched next to the pile of objects on the floor. There was an empty cigarette carton and a bottle cap, a scrap of fabric, a bus ticket, a fragment of a ceramic dish — it would have looked like trash to any Muggle and indeed to most wizards, but this close to it Graeme could feel the magic burning against the skin of his face. “I didn’t even know anybody did magic like this anymore,” he said.

“What even _is_ it,” Elise said again. It wasn’t panic in her voice so much as a familiar kind of blinded frustration that Graeme thought he himself recalled from childhood, when adults, especially his own parents, but also Wray’s parents, even when Wray’s mom was dying, would only semi-explain anything of any importance.

“It’s like a set of talismans,” Graeme explained. “They aren’t what they look like. They’re probably stones or bones and sticks and stuff…”

He was going to have to do this like putting a jar on top of a spider and catching it with a piece of paper. He sat cross-legged on the floor and built a kind of shield cup in his hands, using the root of every Latinate shield spell he could think of, weaving all the layers together like a knitter. Apart from sound magic and everyday sorts of spells, it was probably the most serious magic he had done since school, so that when he was finished, and the shield was thick enough to be opaque and heavy, he could feel his heartbeat shaking his entire body. With extreme care he placed the shield cup over top of the pile of objects on the floor.

“Graeme?”

“Yeah?”

“What should we do if — ”

“Are you guys going to leave if I tell you to leave right now?”

He looked back at them over his shoulder. They had at least retreated to the doorway, where they hovered together as though they were awaiting a catastrophic earthquake. “No,” Elise said shakily.

“If I tell you to run will you at least run?”

“What’s it going to do?”

“Hard to know,” Graeme said. “Probably explode.”

“Explode?”

“Yeah. We’re under the concert hall, aren’t we?”

He looked between Elise and Darrell, looking for an answer that was not to the question he had just asked. Remarkably he hadn’t been too panicked about this whole situation until he had reached this realization, but he felt a cold stone of dread sink into his gut. The kids’ eyes were wide and dark. They were smart enough to know what this whole thing meant.

“You’re sure it's hotter than it was when you first found it,” Graeme asked them. That cold, bitter dread was effervescing and percolating out of his stomach into everywhere else like a drop of cream in black coffee.

“It’s even hotter now than it was five minutes ago!” Elise near-shouted.

“Okay, okay.”

He built another shield. It had to be as strong but thinner than paper so as not to disturb the objects when he slid it under them. Toward the end of making it, he realized that he could feel the heat of the talismans even through the shield cup. He could feel it against his legs through the concrete floor. He looked behind him but Elise and Darrell were already halfway down the hall. And upstairs the crowd were stamping on the floor.

Several things happened quite quickly. He slid the paper shield as quickly as he could under the cup. It had nearly made the other side when he felt something trip. There was no time for any thought at all before it blew. There was no sound — there was a great fission of magic which filtered every atom in Graeme's body, like sand being sifted through some great hand, so that for a split second he felt entirely weightless. Down the hall he heard Elise scream a kind of short terrified scream, as though something had grabbed it as it left her throat. Then he was just sitting on the floor again. Everything was still. The heat of the magic was gone. Upstairs Tremlett played the opening riff to “Plutarch on Mars” and the crowd roared in a great rogue wave of delight.

Graeme got to his feet. His knees wobbled. He heard running footsteps behind him and then the kids were at his side asking a thousand questions at once.

“Are you okay?”

“What happened?”

“What was that?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Is it gone?”

Graeme added one of his own. “Are you guys okay?”

Elise and Darrell nodded.

“Can you make a spark?” Graeme asked. He showed them in his own hand in part just to check that his own magic was unharmed. 

“Can we — we don't have our wands.”

Darrell understood. “What’s the spell?”

“ _Scintillam_.”

It took them a heart-stopping thirty seconds, because they weren't used to doing magic without wands, but they both managed. “Okay, good,” Graeme said. “Thank god.”

“Can it do that? Take away your magic?”

“I don’t really know what it could’ve done. It’s gone now.”

“Are you sure?”

Graeme nodded. “I’m sure,” he said.

“Are you positive?”

“Can _you_ feel anything anymore?”

Elise was standing close enough to him that he could feel her breathing. “No,” she said.

“Okay. I’m going to kick it over.”

“Graeme — ”

The shield cup rolled and rattled on the floor. It was pure white inside, like a field of snow. There was a similar pale part-circle on the paper-thin shield resting on the concrete. In the cut-off crescent that hadn’t been contained within both shields, there was a great dark mar. Graeme kicked the lower shield aside too before he saw that the mar was actually a hole. There was nothing else — no trash, no talismans.

He went and knelt on the floor and Elise and Darrell followed him. He thought he already knew how bad it would be, but it was worse. He made a light in his fingers and reeled it into the hole in the ground, and it kept going until it went out.

\--

Two hours later they were all squeezed in Graeme's green room like commuters on the tube — Imani, Flora, Sal, and Graeme; the seven Weird Sisters; Moira, Kelton, and Meabh; Evvy and Croydon. Elise and Darrell were sitting up on the vanity, surveying the proceedings like a pair of child monarchs. Wagtail, after coming offstage, receiving a rapid-fire briefing from the kids, and sweatily, suffocatingly embracing each of his children and then Graeme, had halfheartedly attempted to hustle Elise and Darrell out when what they were going to have to discuss became clear. When it became immediately obvious that that wasn't going to work he had settled for standing beside them with one long arm around both their little shoulders.

Upstairs, people were still filing out of the great hall — Graeme could hear their footsteps creaking in the old floorboards, high drunken laughter, roadies rolling the amps toward the trucks outside. Someone had gone to get Ras, who had been schmoozing with the label execs and other assorted bigwigs in the balcony in the hope of securing additional donations, so that once he showed up Graeme was obliged to tell the story again from the beginning for possibly the sixth time. By this time it had been much condensed to specifics. “The kids found a bunch of cursed talismans down in one of the sub-basements,” he said. “We covered them, but. It was a near thing.”

“Near thing?”

“There’s a mile-deep hole in the floor presently,” Wagtail said unceremoniously. His booming voice was tight. “That curse would have blown this entire block off the map for good.”

Ras looked from Elise to Darrell to Graeme. “You covered them?”

“Yeah, I made these little shields… they’re down there still. The cops should probably look at them. They’re the only evidence that’s left, I guess.”

“What are the cops gonna do,” Imani mused. “Find out who did it and pat them on the back?”

The general air in the room was that magical law enforcement was not to be trusted — understandably, considering creepy news seemed to come out every day, relegated to the back pages of the _Prophet_ or, worse, appearing alongside unproven conspiracy theories in the _Quibbler_. Imani had recently showed Graeme a clipping from a tiny Dorset wizarding paper, where a local reporter, after a dogged investigation, had found links between the bombing of a club for Muggle-born wizards in Bournemouth, in February 1991, and an MLE sergeant in Poole who had recently retired from the force with a full pension.

“Insurance won’t cover anything unless there's a police report,” said Evvy apologetically. “If there really is a mile-deep hole in the floor…”

“Has anyone found anything else?” Ras asked. “Did anyone hear or see anything strange tonight?”

“The crew’s combing the building,” Croydon told them. “We'll know soon if anything else has turned up.”

“There is something,” said Flora. She pursed her lips tightly when every head in the room turned her way. “Imani and I got — months ago now. We really did think it was nothing. But we did get…”

“ — a not so friendly love note,” Imani finished.

This was news to Graeme. He looked Sal’s way, only to find that Sal had looked to him. They exchanged what Graeme had come to think of as their George and Ringo look, but he hoped George and Ringo had never had to look at each other like this. The undercurrent of something like betrayal by omission was a cold electricity.

“What did it say,” Croydon asked Imani evenly.

“It just said for us cunts to stop what we're doing before we regret it,” Imani said. “I think you all can probably understand why we assumed it was just some… pissed-off loser.” In the cool silence that followed, Imani folded her arms across her chest tightly. Ras rested a hand on her back and she shrugged it off. “Evidently it wasn’t,” she said, in a voice so uncharacteristically small that it cracked Graeme's heart.

Evvy, as she was wont to do, interrupted the hesitation and confusion to deploy some actionable items. “I’ll report everything to the MLE tomorrow morning,” she said. “I know nothing’ll probably come of it… but at least I’ll be able to pay for the damage to the foundation. They’ll probably want to take statements, but we all need sleep. Croydon, you take Imani and Flora home, help them do a sweep of their place, and get that note. If anybody else wants company going home… I'd be happy to send a member of my crew, who I’m sure would also be amenable to being seduced…”

There was a round of perfunctory laughter. Then back to the shell-shocked silence. Wagtail embraced his children. Sal came over to where Graeme was sitting against the wall, ruffled his hair, helped him to his feet, gave him a brief, warm hug. “Good on you, kid,” he said, but his voice was tight. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Graeme told him, “except for the imminent catastrophic double adrenaline crash.”

“Brutal,” Sal agreed. He wouldn’t quite let go of Graeme’s shoulders.

“Can we get a drink tomorrow, Sal,” Graeme asked him. If Sal's voice sounded tight, and Imani's sounded small, his sounded kind of weak and lonely, even to his own ear.

“Bet on it. The usual spot? Seven?”

“See you there.”

Over Sal’s shoulder, Graeme watched Croydon usher Imani and Flora toward the door. “Get home safe,” Sal told him.

They dissipated like blown dandelion seeds. Evvy called a limo back home to Shacklewell for Imani, Flora, and Croydon. Sal, Moira, Kel, and Meabh went out to the high street and hailed a black cab back to Highbury. A very stylish woman in red appeared from nowhere to take care of arrangements for the Weird Sisters; Graeme later learned, to his surprise, that this was the dreaded Mitzi Love. He said his goodbyes, absorbed about a thousand hugs and handshakes hardly feeling them, and headed out into the mews, toward the doorway into the paint shop and the everyday world beyond, only to nearly jump out of his skin when the terrifying sound of running footsteps behind him turned into someone calling his name.

It was Courtney. “Jesus,” he said, “were you about to fucking hex me?”

“I don’t know,” Graeme said, feeling enraged all of a sudden, “were you just _chasing_ me after all that shit that just went down?”

“Oh. Right.”

Courtney followed him out through the paint shop to the high street. Even Muggle London was quiet this late. "Where are you going?” Courtney said.

“Home.”

“By yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you think that’s maybe a bad idea?”

He looked like he wanted to help, and Graeme was too tired to argue with him. “Fine,” he said.

Courtney took off his big wool coat and draped it over Graeme's shoulders (even though Graeme was already wearing his own coat), hailed a black cab, held the door open for Graeme and everything. “Malvern and Mapledene?” Graeme asked the driver.

“Hackney, by the London Fields?”

“You bet.”

The radio, heavy-handedly, was playing Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s “Grey Cell Green.” _When your desire has been found / you’ll be running far away…_ Graeme put his forehead against the cool window. The adrenaline crash was low enough to feel like the end of a bad acid trip. He had already begun mentally enumerating all the booze he had at home.

“Everybody was talking about what happened,” Courtney said for some fucking reason. “They said — ” He cast a wary eye toward the Muggle driver, who was clearly eavesdropping, but who had definitely heard worse. “Well, you're very brave.”

“No, I'm not,” Graeme said. “I’m very stupid.”

“How about you just take the compliment.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

The light was melting on the quiet street, smeared, glistening in the wet stillness, like a dropped and crushed bouquet.

“Well can I put my arm around you or something,” Courtney said after a while.

“No,” Graeme told him. But he carefully moved his knee so that it touched Courtney’s knee, and then Courtney wrapped his hand around it, so that Graeme could feel his warm palm through the tear in his jeans. He closed his eyes and imagined he was somewhere else. It took almost everything he had not to cry.

Back at the flat Graeme poured himself a coffee mug basically full of scotch while Courtney made a big show of turning all the lights on and thoroughly inspecting the bathtub, medicine cabinet, closet, kitchen cabinets, and refrigerator in search of sabotage and nefariousness. “Okay,” he said, closing the freezer after rifling through the ice trays and frostbitten bread and ice cream, “everything looks fine.”

“Right,” said Graeme, who had known that since the minute he’d set foot in the door. He took a long sip from the scotch mug. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” said Courtney. So far he had valiantly attempted the general dashing and capable air of a handyman or ghostbuster, but then he met Graeme’s eyes and the whole facade collapsed. For a moment there was a precious glimpse of a very young and very scared person, in which Graeme saw some kind of terrible and embarrassing mirror of himself, so that they reached for each other at the same time and embraced one another tightly. The point of Courtney’s nose pressed under Graeme's ear, where his hair still felt damp with rain and sweat. For maybe a full minute they breathed at the same time, like a single organism.

The hug was probably more for Courtney’s sake than his own, Graeme told himself, feeling Courtney’s deep, shaky breaths in his own ribs. That was alright; he could do that. He closed his eyes. He imagined somewhere else, some-when else, the suggestion of some _one_ else, evening wind in the pines, Galaxie 500 on the stereo, shifting his weight foot to foot to the slow waltzy rhythm of something like “Blue Thunder,” so that when the nature of the embrace slowly shifted from the commiserating to the amorous he didn’t initially notice, until Courtney attached his lips to the join of Graeme’s neck and jaw. It cut a kind of hot-cold railroad spike right through him and not a good one.

_God damn it._

He was unwrapped reluctantly from Courtney’s arms. Cold hands shifted under his shirt and spread over the soft boneless place between his hips and ribs, over the by-now very-old scar.

“Baby,” Courtney said against his throat, so that it echoed in all the grist and cartilage and the sound of it came boomeranging back to Graeme's ear sounding like a kind of spiteful mockery. Baby! It would have been laughable, if he could have laughed. “Come to bed with me — ” a kiss pressed in the soft place behind Graeme’s ear — “let me take care of you…”

That was the last straw. Graeme stepped neatly out from between Courtney and the counter, nearly upsetting the scotch mug. There was a moment’s strange oil-and-water inversion. Courtney looked him up and down with a horny confusion. His lips were bright and open red. “I think maybe it would be better tonight for me to be alone,” Graeme said, not unsurprised by the firmness in his own voice.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Right.”

“Okay, well…”

He gave Courtney his big wool coat back and showed him to the door. “Are you going to call me,” Courtney asked.

“Sure.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Graeme sighed. “Fine.”

It was such a sweet and delicate kiss of the threshold persuasion that Graeme's knees nearly buckled and he almost succumbed. Instead he said, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. You be safe.”

“And you.”

Then he shut and locked the door and went back to the counter for the scotch, listening to the footsteps in the hall. When he had finished the contents of the mug, he poured another, and by the end of that he felt… well, not much of anything at all, and that was good. He put all the lights out in the flat and watched the clouds move against the red sky in the kitchen window, stretching apart, showing pale and unfamiliar stars… He thought about calling Alex, thought about calling Lockett. What could he have possibly said? All of us were nearly annihilated tonight. Atomized. Erased from time. Yes, of course I’m okay. No, I don't need anything. No, I’m not coming home yet.

Flora called a little later, in the wee hours of the morning, while Graeme was making a grilled cheese. He would have been surprised if any of them had even tried to sleep. “If you want to go home,” Flora said, “I won’t stop you.”

“What? Why would I go home?”

“Graeme, that was… beyond a threat to our lives. That was an attempt on our lives.” 

“I signed all that paperwork,” he reminded her. “In sickness and in health…”

“Yeah,” said Flora. “I think we’re a little beyond sickness.”

“It’s really, Flor, I just wish you’d told Sal and me about that note. I mean, we’re all in this together…”

Right?

Flora sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wish we’d told you too. We really did think it was nothing. It seems pretty silly right now…”

Silly was one word for it, Graeme thought. “What’s next?”

“Well, Evvy wants to cancel the European tour,” Flora said. Graeme could see her in his mind's eye, standing in her pajamas in the darkened hall of the townhouse on Belgrade Road, twisting the phone cord around her finger. “So we might have nothing for you to do.”

“Cancel the tour? Really?”

“That’s what I said. Whoever did this wants to shut us up and if we do, they win. But Evvy kept saying, fifteen hundred people could have died tonight, and I suppose she’s right, you know…”

Evvy _was_ right. It was probably, technically, wildly irresponsible for Saint Rose to continue with the spin cycle as if nothing had happened. But none of the four of them had ever been the type to easily give in. And, in 1992, with all the unhealed wounds from the early eighties wizarding conflict that nobody ever talked about still hideously festering, it also seemed wildly irresponsible to let fear get the best of them. They were all here because of silence. The silence couldn’t be healed with more silence.

“What do you want to do?” Graeme asked Flora.

“I want to show whoever did this that I’m unintimidated by cowardice. I only don’t know how yet.”

“Well, whatever you decide, I’ll be with you.”

He heard Flora’s deep, ponderous breath on the other end of the line. “I can’t ask you to do that,” she said finally.

“You’re not asking me! I’m telling you, I’m staying.”

Flora hesitated. He could feel her calling to mind a number of arguments and deciding that none of them would work. “You’re a good’un, kid,” she said after a moment. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Night, Flor. Get some sleep.”

He watched the sun grow into the kitchen window, drinking, picking apart his burnt grilled cheese, trying not to think, thinking anyway. This was either suicidally foolish, suicidally stubborn, or unquestionably the right thing to do. Or all three. At first, he wondered, as he usually did, what Wray would have done, but rather quickly — with the coming of the dawn — he understood that it didn’t matter. The reason he was here at all was that Wray was gone. He had had a friend who loved him very much, who had made him look at what he was capable of until he saw it, and who had subsequently shuffled off the mortal coil. And when he had given himself the choice to quit or go on, it hadn't felt like a choice at all. Of course he had gone on. It would be the same this time, he understood — it would be the same every time. There was nothing else to do but go on.

The sky blushed blue-red with the dawn in the eastern window. _Sailors take warning._ And yet he didn’t feel afraid. Why would he? He was riding as a bannerman of two Joans of Arc.

After a little while he put the kettle on, rolled a messy joint, sloshed a little cream and a little more scotch into a mug of steaming Earl Grey. Sat in his unmade, unslept bed and tried to play whatever this feeling was in the style of Dean Wareham’s five minute solo on Galaxie 500’s cover of “Listen, the Snow is Falling,” which was the sound of discordant, disharmonious certainty, running pell-mell down the bloody hill toward death at the head of a column of light…

\---

\--

-


	6. 6.

**6.**

**January 1993**

\--

January 8th, 1993, was unremarkable and cold, and beyond the windows of the old stone house the light was diffuse and fragile on the long dark moor. It was also Graeme’s twenty-third birthday. When he got up at seven — his “sleep schedule” being so fucked as to be nonexistent — nobody else was awake yet, so he bundled up and went out for a walk alone along the ancient track above the low farmlands, up to the ruins of the old abbey and back. When he was halfway home Lockett called him on the two-way mirror; he was with Kyla and Ross in the practice space on Cap Hill and they played an extremely heavy version of the happy birthday song with lots of distortion.

“Don’t make me want to Apparate across the world and jam with you three,” Graeme said when the last wailing notes died down. His voice sounded about as thick as clotted cream. “I think you just scared all the birds away.”

“Where even are you?” Kyla asked, peering curiously into the mirror.

In all the downtime Graeme had managed to get the mirror’s visual reception back to about ninety percent of its original quality. “I can’t disclose the location,” he told Kyla mysteriously, even though he'd told Lockett it was the North York Moors.

“It’s very green there,” Ross observed.

It was. It was green enough that, depending on the day, it either gently bandaged the homesickness-wound or scored another knife even deeper into the heart of it. Today it was the gentle bandage. He turned the mirror around and tried to give them a panoramic view of the old stone wall buttressing the hill, and the mossy sprawl of the fields toward the distant horizon. From the other end of the mirror he heard various oohs and aahs, even though it didn’t really hold a candle to Washington state because nothing could.

“What are you doing today for your birthday,” Lockett asked.

“I don’t know. Probably trying to write songs. Make a nice dinner.”

“Champagne?”

“I’m done with champagne for life!”

Seeing their faces — even Ross’s — felt like such a precious and incredible gift, so that he didn’t want to say goodbye, even when there was nothing left to talk about. “We should probably get back to rehearsal,” Kyla said finally. “I’ve got a shift in an hour, and — Graeme, did Lockett tell you? We booked a show in February.”

There was that strike of envy or something that happened whenever he thought about everything that was happening in Seattle without him. Also, Lockett hadn't told him that. “That’s great,” Graeme said. “I mean, it was only a matter of time…”

“You haven’t even heard us play!”

“That was the best ever rendition of the happy birthday song.”

“It’s with Nightshade at the Den,” Lockett explained. “I’m thinking about asking Alex to open, except that she’d upstage us all.”

Graeme hadn’t been able to stop listening to the tape recording that Lockett had sent him of Alex’s debut solo set, even though — or perhaps because — it made him cry. It was pure elegiacal misery.

“Well,” Graeme said, “it could end up working out in your favor, because if she does open for you then you have to play the best you possibly can in order to get anywhere near her level.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I know that from experience. Listen, go back to practice and call me sometime to tell me about the show, okay?”

They said goodbyes. Kyla blew a kiss. Graeme walked the rest of the way back to the stone house trying to breathe in enough of the clean, bright air — rain, wet stone, turned fields, peat moss — to cure the amorphous heartache. Coming down the hill to the house he slipped in the mud and fell on his ass and that did it. He came in the door soaked and muddy and laughing hysterically to himself only to find that Sal and Imani and Flora had taken the opportunity of his absence to decorate the kitchen and living room with assorted colorful streamers and floral wreaths, and concoct an extremely ornate breakfast that included some kind of very elegant cake with his name on it.

He had not even known they knew it was his birthday. He had certainly not expected them to do anything special at all. Things had been kind of weird, perhaps predictably, over the previous three weeks or so since the events of the December 12th benefit. The fact that the show had successfully raised nearly thirty thousand galleons for the St. Mungo’s AIDS ward, doubled to sixty thousand by the addition from the Boardman family trust, had been on precisely nobody's mind. Almost everybody who had performed or worked at D&R that night had been called in to the London MLE offices over the course of the week following to answer perfunctory questions. Graeme didn’t know how it had gone for anybody else — they pointedly had not talked about it — but he had been sat down in a kind of interrogation room with three detectives in plainclothes for nearly two full hours, so that he eventually asked, “Am I being charged with something?” At last, he understood that they didn't believe it was possible for him to have created the shields, especially without a wand, necessitating that he make them again in front of the detectives. Eventually they let him go home, but it was with a deeply uneasy feeling that still had not quite entirely gone away.

Just before Christmas, Imani and Flora had summoned Graeme and Sal to the house on Belgrade Road. The news was thusly delivered that Hellfire Club had postponed Saint Rose's planned European tour to mid-April through mid-June 1993 in order to give the MLE time for an investigation that everybody knew would go nowhere, and to come up with a security plan for said tour to prevent any future catastrophes. In the interim, they were being offered the use of Croydon’s family’s country cottage on the outskirts of a town called Rosedale Abbey, for purposes of writing a second Saint Rose album.

Sal had been a bit hung up on the note thing. Graeme had been too, if he was being honest, and they'd talked about it in the pub, both of them feeling a little sensitive and probed by the MLE interrogation, but Sal had been the one to bring it up with the girls. Then there was a whole to-do. It had not necessarily been a screaming fight, but it had not been far from it. It was definitely more closely resembling a fight than any other argument they’d had as a band. “Sal,” Flora had said, “I don’t know if you could even begin to wrap your head around the fact that most women live under the general condition of being mildly threatened just about all the time…”

“Oh my god.” Sal had buried his head in his hands. Graeme had just been sitting there on the couch beside him staring out the window and wanting to die. “You don't have to bring politics into this. You lied to us!”

“Think seriously for a second about what you would have actually done,” Imani said coldly. “‘You’re being hysterical, it’s no big deal…’”

“You think _we_ — ” Sal gestured between himself and Graeme — “would have called _you_ hysterical?”

“You would have dismissed it the same way we did!” Flora said.

“At least we would have known about it!”

The worst silence ever ensued. “Can we agree to disagree,” Graeme dared.

There was an irate chorus of “No!” from all corners.

“Can we maybe just agree to um, you know, not do it again…”

They exchanged tenuous agreement and unceremoniously parted ways. Sal was pissed at Graeme for not backing him up in the argument, and, unbeknownst to them, Flora was pissed at Imani for not taking the initial threat to Evvy, as she had said she would, so there was no detente even among the factions. The following weekend they had driven up to York in a van fully stocked with instruments and groceries and rudimentary recording equipment, not speaking, and headed down the narrow winding roads into the moors. Since then, they had mostly been going for walks alone, watching _Twin Peaks_ VHS tapes in silence, or, occasionally, electrifyingly, angrily jamming without speaking, which had produced some recordings that they would later begrudgingly admit sounded amazing.

In short, it had not been the type of environment conducive to any kind of celebratory atmosphere. And yet, here they were. Graeme stood in the doorway with his jaw on the floor for a moment in which they all eyed each other in petrified stillness, and then he started laughing hysterically again, and then they were all laughing and hugging him gingerly because he was covered in mud. He went off to his room to get dry clothes on while they finished the preparations and came back out to find Catherine Wheel on the antique record player and the kitchen table stocked with Bloody Marys, eggs and bacon, rye toast, blueberry pancakes, scones with dried cranberries and walnuts… “We couldn’t wait on the cake,” Imani said, passing Graeme the maple syrup. “It’s for dessert. Breakfast dessert!”

Flora had driven to Pickering to get the cake at the local bakery. It was dark chocolate with blue-grey vanilla frosting and someone had piped on top the words _Graeme is 23!_ “There wasn’t a lot of room,” Flora explained apologetically.

“It’s perfect,” said Graeme. He was so overwhelmingly touched that he kept thinking he might have to excuse himself to go cry somewhere. “It’s really perfect. Thank you.”

It felt impossibly good to laugh together again and look each other in the eyes and brush hands passing communal dishes and not to drink alone. Cutting the little cake, around noon, once they’d polished off the entire pitcher of Bloody Marys and most of the rest of the food, tipsy, laughing just at the sound of Sal’s uncharacteristically musical giggling in response to one of Imani’s anecdotes, Graeme understood that it wasn’t really about him. They’d all needed an excuse to kiss and make up. He supposed he was lucky to have the January birthday and get a cake out of it.

The sun set so early out here that the day pretty much felt like a wash by the time they made it through the dishes. “What do you want to do with your birthday afternoon, Graeme,” Imani asked.

He wanted the one thing he’d wanted this whole time. “Want to jam?”

In a half hour's time they had pushed all the furniture to the edges of the living room, moved the fragile stuff into the spare bedroom, got instruments and pedals and amps meticulously arrayed, opened fresh beers, mixed fresh cocktails. There’d been no sun all day, but the light outside was hovering at the edge of existence. Imani put all the lights out and lit a few candles. “Flor,” she said, “what about that bassline from the other day.”

“The one I cribbed from — whatever silly baggy song?”

She had cribbed it at first from “There’s No Other Way” by Blur, but it had taken on a life of its own the last time they'd sat down together to jam. Except they had walked away from it without finishing anything. “Yeah,” Imani said, filtering through her keyboard presets for the right distortion. “And Sal, do the Slint drums.”

“Yes, mistress,” said Sal, clattering through a rough impression of the chorus of “Nosferatu Man.”

“Graeme — ”

“Do you want the Slint guitar or the baggy guitar?”

“I want the you guitar.”

Easy enough. They played until Sal noticed the edge of the full moon at the crest of the hill, and they threw coats and boots on and ran outside and up through the mud away from the house, slipping and tripping over each other and laughing, in time to watch the pale, otherworldly light spill over the moor like a flood of liquid from a dropped snowglobe. Then they went back inside and started again from the beginning.

This session was the genesis of a demo first titled “Goat Boy,” which became “Moon and Moor,” the sprawling first track on Saint Rose’s 1996 sophomore LP _Spite!_ Indeed, the sessions recorded during the band’s two-month stint in Rosedale Abbey spawned about a third of the eventual album, including the singles “Blood Red” and “Limerence,” even though, in most cases, the songs went into a vault in embryonic, sloppy, twenty-minute form, with nonsense lyrics and pauses instead of bridges, and emerged more than three years later as rough gems, pitched to a minor key and shorn down to reveal cloudy interior facets.

While they jammed, wrote songs, undertook ambitious baking projects, wandered on the moor, participated in awkward telephone calls with Evvy and Croydon wherein they were briefed on increasingly insane security arrangements for the spring tour, and generally tried to pretend they weren’t hiding from anything, rather, that this was a calculated retreat, the world outside went on as it was wont to do. The MLE concluded their investigation into the December D&R incident by the end of January, claiming that their findings had been inconclusive. _W.R.W._ called for a comment and Imani told them to go fuck themselves, which reinvigorated the minor press firestorm surrounding the event itself. In interviews surrounding the release of their self-titled debut album, Draught of Living Death — namely the frontman, Aloysius Remington — had begun intimating that what had happened in December had been overblown, or even fabricated:

_W.R.W.: What's on your mind as you gear up for your first European tour? A lot of the artists I talk to have been a little on edge since the events in December at Dyatlov & Roswell. _

_A.R.: I don’t think we have anything to fear. The MLE investigation was inconclusive, which means there isn’t evidence that any crime was committed in the first place._

_W.R.W.: But there are witnesses!_

_A.R.: Witnesses who have something to gain by playing the victim. [ Shrugs ] You won’t find us manipulating sympathy for our money. We don't need to._

Sal claimed he had never read anything more hilarious in his life. Imani and Flora seemed to be enraged by the sight of Remington’s face, finding excuses to leave the room whenever Draught of Living Death’s music videos came on the Witching Hour. Graeme felt sorry for them, same as he had when he’d first seen them at the North Riding Festival. The songs were shameless Hobgoblins rips, except boring. They were obliged to cause a scene and pick fights in the press because they had nothing else going for them. But the longer they sat there, absorbing the various blows of bad news, uncertain if the tour would go on, feeling like four Rapunzels locked away in the tower of eventual irrelevance, the more enraging it all seemed.

At the end of February, Evvy called, and Imani asked to speak to her alone. It was a remarkably warm, clear day, so Flora and Sal and Graeme went for a long walk on the moor in a shared, nervous silence. When they got back, Imani was pacing in the kitchen, hands on her hips. “I told Evvy we’re coming back,” she announced. “Thursday. I told her we're either going on that goddamn tour or we’re recording a new album. But whatever it is, we need to be back in London for rehearsal.”

And thus they were lifted, by the scruffs of their necks, out of the demoralizing stasis. The last days in Rosedale Abbey were a flurry of activity: packing up, tidying, trying new song ideas, trying to remember their _Severe Asceticism_ set, carefully listening over and labeling the demo tapes for later reference in the studio. If Graeme slept a wink, he was doing the same thing in his dreams. Sometimes, after everybody else had gone to sleep, he sat up alone in one of the the living room armchairs in the dark, watching the moon and the stars beyond the oscillating waveforms of the clouds and hills, playing guitar to resemble the feeling and to mismatch it, playing a soulmate and a nemesis, dancing together in the same musical phrase…

The night before they left, he knew he ought to be sleeping, except that he couldn’t. Everything was in boxes or already in the van. They’d rearranged the living room into their collective assumption of what it may have looked like before they arrived, eaten cold leftovers for dinner, gone for one last frigid moonlight walk on the moor, and then everybody else had gone to bed. And Graeme sat down with his guitar in the armchair and asked the same questions of himself that he always did whenever he felt the urge to write something:

What do I miss?

What is missing from me now?

He started to play the sound of home first. Deep, cold echoes. Heavy green. The way the forest swallowed you up in thick pine loam and ferns and hanging moss and silenced every sound but the distant, conjectural wind. A twig breaking just behind you by no precedent. Spring-fed streams running cold red with leaching tannins over the shore-beaten cobbles. The sensation of being watched by other-than-a-person. Everywhere eyes. Cold water, fog, rain, cherry blossoms in the spring. It washed into the customary ghost. There was a kind of shifting, simmering chord progression that evoked a semi-consciousness of Wray; Graeme had played it before. Sometimes he played it for hours. It had roots in some of the oldest Crucia songs and a handful of Nirvana b-sides. Sometimes he thought he even recognized it in the tape Lockett had made of Alex’s solo set. It was like a signature of Wray: the conviction, the pain, the otherness… He leaned into the otherness, and then it turned into something new.

At first he almost discounted it, because it sounded too much like one of Lockett’s riffs for Terrormancy, back in the day: angular, powerful, underpinned by a cold current. Then he understood what he was doing and doubled down, shifting the magic into his version of the jagged, rudimentary sound spells he’d learned from watching Lockett, which Lockett, in turn, had probably taught himself, alone and lonely in some dark woods… Graeme moved the chords through a couple changes and circled back to cycle the same strange and beautiful phrase over and over again. This was technically wallowing, he figured in whatever corner of his conscious mind was still ticking. Writing a song about Lockett in the style of Lockett. But what else to do with this feeling? And how else to write a song about Lockett?

He wasn't sure how long it had been when he was surprised back into his senses by something dropping a stone into the still water. When he looked up it was only Flora, in her nightgown and housecoat, settling her bass in her lap. “That sounds incredible,” she said.

Graeme unearthed some relevant English words from under the total awareness of sound. “Just a chord progression,” he managed through the fog. 

“Well keep going!”

He did. He felt Flora step in beside him. He felt her feet come off the ground. They dove together into the blue depths of it, and he found that he didn’t want to come up again. Flora had to pull him out with her hand at his wrist after about twenty minutes, and then he had to blink all this crud and salt out of his eyes like a newborn kitten while the sound spiraled into nothingness. “Where'd that come from!” Flora asked, elatedly.

She was looking at him like he was a first rosebud of spring. Heretofore he had only quite shared that electric magic of spinning something out like thread before your mind's eye with Wray and Alex. “Just — you ever try to play like somebody else?”

“All the time. But who plays like that?”

“Um, this friend of mine from home.”

“Can you teach me the spells?”

He shook his head. “Alex and I tried it once; I think you have try to feel them in the guitar because they're not Latinate.”

“Just try to explain them and I'll approximate, my version, so they're complimentary, you know?”

“Yeah! Yes — good idea. Okay — ”

When next they made it out from under the veil of noise, it was just past dawn, and they had put down a couple rough guitar tracks and Flora's bass, unloaded the snare and a cymbal from the van to lay down a rudimentary drum track that would probably give Sal a heart attack from vicarious embarrassment, and recorded some mumbled nonsense vocals from Flora, trying to find the right melody. Her versions of the spells were bitterer than Graeme's, and ashy, like a tarnished jewel against the swirling grey fog. “What do you want to call that one,” she asked him while they ate the last of the cheese in the fridge off the block in the kitchen, exhausted in the weak light. 

“I was never very good at this part. What do you want to call it?”

“Dunno,” said Flora with her mouth full. “It's your song.”

“Um — ”

“What's your friend's name that plays like that?”

Was it possible that he had not yet told her? “Lockett,” he said. 

“Why don’t you tell me how you feel about him,” Flora said like it was the easiest question in the world to answer, cutting a thin sliver off the stub of cheese.

“What? Why?”

“It’ll help me with the lyrics,” she said, shrugging. “Unless you want to write them.”

Graeme studied her. He wouldn’t have even told Alex this, if she’d asked, not that she would have asked. Later he chalked everything up to the fact that he was so tired it all felt like a dream. “Well, I sort of wanted to be him, you know, when we were younger. I didn't think we would ever be friends. And now, I guess we are, but…”

“But what?”

“There’s this, some sticky thing, I don’t know.”

Past Flora’s messy hair the moon in the window touched the edge of the hill.

“I think we're afraid of each other,” Graeme said, kind of realizing it as he was saying it. “I don’t know why.”

“Hmm,” Flora said. “I think you do.”

“I think I do too,” Graeme told her. “I don’t think I even want to tell myself. Let alone you!”

Flora nodded. “We can just name it after Lockett for now,” she said, rooting around in the pockets of her housecoat until she found a pencil. “You can do the honors, go ahead and put it on the tape.”

This is insane, he thought, just writing Lockett's name gently on the spool, this is literally insane, I have literally gone insane. Beneath it he put down the date, _February 21-22, 1993_ , and _St. James / Sugarbush_. When everything was said and done nobody would hear the recording, not even Sal and Imani, until Flora showed it to Moira in the autumn of 1995, along with some handwritten lyrics:

_You’d never hurt me  
_ _But I want you to_  
_You’re scared to be  
_ _I’m scared for you_

Saint Rose revisited it during the sessions for _Spite!_ in the early spring of 1996, and when it was finally released, as the lead single from that record, it had gotten a great deal sharper, wounded-sounding with a jagged edge; it benefited tremendously from the unique talents of not one but two actual drummers, it had even more guitar tracks and an actual vocal line, and it was called “Limerence.”

\--

The four members of Double Double were barely out of their teens. In fact, Moira was pretty sure the bassist, Key, was lying about their age. She met the quartet in their favorite divey Brixton pub, around the corner from the squat they shared, to find them all nursing lagers in the back corner. “Moira, are you sure about this,” said the drummer, Jessie, before Moira had even sat down with her dry martini.

“I’m dead sure. You four know what songs you want to record?”

The rhythm guitarist, Leith, who also wrote most of the lyrics, slid a sheet of notebook paper across the table. In the bottom left corner, surrounded by a web of cross-outs and scribblings in each of the band members’ handwriting, Leith had circled a list of five songs. Moira was heartened to see the names of the two numbers, “Rosewater” and “A Deed Without A Name,” that she had been certain would make a dynamite double-A-side single in the nascent times of springy, fuzzy Britpop.

“You can do these five in two hours?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We were up all night practicing,” said Win, the lead guitarist and singer. Indeed, there were dark purple circles under his handsome eyes.

“Alright. Everybody screw your liquid courage to the sticking place…”

They finished their drinks and headed out into the cool, bright day. The band members, instruments in tow, clustered behind Moira like a gaggle of nervous ducklings, having been instructed in no uncertain terms to act confident (though Moira wasn't quite sure if this would work out) and follow her lead. Together they turned off the Brixton Hill Road and headed past a sign reading _PRIVATE ESTATE: RESIDENTS ONLY_. Down here was the wizarding quarter of South London, which consisted mostly of council flats and a couple seedy shops. And, oddly enough, one of the best-regarded recording studios in U.K. wizarding rock, on par with Owlsblood in Manchester and the Tombs outside Edinburgh: Wormwood Studios. It was beyond unassuming from the front — a low, squat building; blacked out windows with a couple rain-bleached out-of-date concert flyers peeling away from the filthy glass — but inside it smelled like new teak and good weed; the equipment was cutting-edge, improved with carefully practiced and expertly cast sound magic; and the engineers, though they were incorrigible stoners, seemed like they knew what they were doing, most of the time.

The lead engineer, Jeb, was sitting in the front room, asleep, with the latest issue of the Muggle Q Magazine open across his belly, but he leapt to his feet pretty quickly when Moira cleared her throat. “Moira,” he said, gathering his wits with effort, surveying with bleary blood-red eyes the motley crew hovering in the doorway. “Where’re Kel and Meabh?”

Moira’s heart was beating somewhere between where it was supposed to be and the verge of her throat. She wouldn't deny she loved this kind of thing. “What?” she said.

“Kel and Meabh — aren't we recording the Sluagh today?”

She could practically feel the kids nervously shifting their weight at her quarter. “There must be some kind of mistake,” she said evenly. “I'm producing Double Double’s new EP for Hellfire Club. That's what we’re here for.”

Jeb had shrunk behind his desk, digging through the mountain of paperwork stacked on top of his defunct computer evidently for some kind of proof that Moira was wrong. "I dunno,” he said, “I could've sworn…”

Moira met Jeb's stoned gaze, steeling her face into the imminent-rage expression. “You can call Evvy and check if you want, but…”

It was bait she knew he wouldn’t take. Evvy’s tolerance for disorganization and time-wasting was slim to nil. “It's alright,” Jeb said, wiping sweaty palms on his slacks. “These are them, then?”

“These are them… Win, lead guitar, vocals; Leith, rhythm guitar, vocals; Key, bass; Jessie, percussion — Jeb Stevenson, engineer extraordinaire.”

“Good to meet you, Jeb,” said Win, offering a handshake with remarkable sangfroid.

“I’ll show you back,” Moira said, wrapping a hand around Leith’s and Key’s shoulders and ushering them toward the door into the recording suite. “Jebby, where's that spliff, I can smell it…”

“I'll roll you a freshie!”

Negotiating one’s first time in a professional recording studio was difficult enough whilst not operating on three hours' sleep and a wash of raw adrenaline. The band milled about, wide-eyed, setting up their equipment with an air of terror and dread, as Jeb got the board set up in the mixing room and Moira went around feeling out and shifting the magic on the relevant amplifiers. Once everybody was ready to go, Moira gathered the kids in the hallway. “We’re going to ask each of you to record your pieces, one at a time, for each song. Drums first, vox last. Can you all do that?”

“Yep,” said Key, though their face seemed pale. “That’s what we practiced.”

“Okay, good.” Moira took the song list from her jeans pocket. “I want to make sure we get ‘Rosewater’ and ‘A Deed.’ So we’ll do those two first, alright?”

“We want to get ‘Plague Pits’ and ‘It’s Grim Up North,’” Leith countered. She didn’t talk much, even though she was the lyricist and occasionally provided angelic harmonies, so that her heavy Glasgow accent — and ever-ready willingness to fight for her songs — was always a little surprising.

Moira liked those songs too, especially “Plague Pits,” a shimmery pop cut with pitch-black lyrics, but they weren’t singles. And if she was going to engineer this series of fortunate events into the launch of a new record label, she needed singles. “We have two hours,” she explained, “and we’re not even supposed to be here. So if you want to get to those two songs, it's rather up to you, isn’t it?”

Leith’s face simmered. Moira watched Key’s middle finger and thumb gently circle her wrist.

“Break a leg,” Moira said.

The kids filed into the studio, and Moira joined Jeb in the mixing room, accepting the fresh spliff he passed her like some kind of ritual offering. “Ready?” Jeb asked her.

“Born ready.”

The resulting EP was only four songs — they never got to “Prime Meridian,” though that would wind up the lead single from the first full album from Double Double, obviously called _Toil and Trouble_ , released in mid-1994 on Moira’s label, Dirty Laundry. At the end of that day in the studio, Jeb gave Moira the masters for her to bring to Evvy, even though Moira had absolutely no intention of doing so, because she had magically impersonated Evvy on the phone booking the recording time for the Sluagh to begin with, though she had also given Jeb Hellfire Club’s Gringotts account number. Instead, accompanied by Leith, who never trusted her (probably wisely), she brought the masters to be printed into vinyl records and cassette tapes at a factory in Birmingham, which was Muggle-operated but used by most wizarding recording artists, because the technicians were quite discreet and tended to refrain from asking questions like, “How the fuck did you get these sounds in a studio?”

The _Rosewater_ EP, released in summer 1993 as the debut recording from both Double Double and the label Dirty Laundry, was one of the fastest selling records of that year and was obliged to be reprinted twice before the release of _Toil and Trouble_ , though by that time Moira was using her own money. With Leith’s incisive lyrics, Win’s liquid croon, and their ever-warring guitars set against the deep bubbly groove of Key and Jessie’s rhythm section (not to mention Moira’s slick production), the quartet were the closest thing the wizarding scene had to a Britpop group to compete with Blur, Pulp, and Oasis, and the records sold accordingly. As Moira had known they would.

On the train home from Birmingham, with Leith nodding off against the window, holding the test pressings tightly to her chest, Moira watched the first buds of spring glowing yellow-green in the tangled trees and hedges paralleling the tracks. The Muggle news was good. The wizarding news was bad. Sal would be back soon, and then they would have to face the gauntlet of Europe. Moira was bored of London, bored of her songs, bored of her band, bored of tour before it even started. Had been pretty bored of Sal, to tell the truth, before he went away. But this was something new.

\--

March 1993 was basically some or another state fair ride: spinning nausea-inducing supersonic loops, every minute under threat of imminent collapse. They booked last-minute midnight sessions at Wormwood Studios to cut quick demos of the best songs from Rosedale Abbey, which they handed off to Evvy for safekeeping in the D&R offices along with the rest of the rough recordings. Rehearsal in the Belgrade Road basement, interviews with assorted European music magazines in preparation for the spring tour of the Continent, another live appearance on W.P.R., an extensive feature interview they were led to believe would be a cover story in _W.R.W._ but which inevitably wasn't (a scoop came in, or so they were told, from Draught of Living Death, who were releasing a new double-A-side single which was immediately inescapable on wizarding radio), hours of time on hold with European venues working out security concerns: everything condensed into a staticky blur. Graeme dreaded the imminent tour about as much as he was desperate for it to start so that something could finally happen. He felt like a hamster on a wheel. Sometimes he called Lockett on the two-way mirror, but it only made him feel even more like a hamster on a wheel. Things were happening in Seattle, and, here, all they could do was wait.

The December incident at D&R had been widely publicized, so that they were asked about it in every interview and sometimes just on the street or in the wizarding shops. And it had been accompanied, disturbingly, by a rash of similar incidents. A possessed tapestry in a wizarding chamber music venue in Cambridgeshire had nearly smothered an elderly Muggle-born couple to death. A set of failed talismans had been discovered at a show by the political folk band River Lethe in Brighton, though this was later discerned to be the work of a copycat amateur. Evvy had received a myriad of threats, and, though she insisted it was nothing new, she privately told Imani that the MLE detective who had been her contact since the late 1980s had been unceremoniously reassigned to a post on the Northumberland Coast, overseeing the transition of prisoners from Ministry custody to the dread prison Azkaban. Graeme had only the most rudimentary understanding of U.K. wizarding politics, so Imani had to explain what this meant while they sat around the basement sipping their lukewarm beers, waiting for Sal to get back with another six-pack. “That’s probably the worst job in the whole MLE bureau,” Imani said. “He must’ve done something wrong.”

“Or he found something he wasn't supposed to find,” said Flora, running a thumbnail up her low E string.

In April, just before the beginning of the European tour, there was a note slipped under the door of the house on Belgrade Road. This time, Imani and Flora summoned Sal and Graeme to study it, like a just-diffused bomb, on the kitchen table.

_CAREFUL, CUNTS_ , it said.

Flora was lighting a cigarette, though she said she didn't smoke. “Well,” she said, “I suppose they know where we live.”

Sal carefully extracted a cigarette from Flora’s pack while she wasn’t looking. “Well,” he countered, “if they have any surprises planned, they’re in for a rude awakening, because we'll all be out of the country for two months starting Friday.”

Imani folded up the note until it was the size of her palm. She seemed to evaluate everything that might possibly be done with it — shoved in her pocket, ripped up in the trash can, burned in the sink — and settled for putting it in the freezer, for some reason. Then she leaned against the fridge, running her hands through her long braids. “What shall we do now,” she said.

It wasn’t a question, but there was only one answer. They all had the same thing on their minds. There was nothing else to do but go on. They went down into the basement and played the set through twice, hardly speaking. They agreed to meet at D&R on Friday morning at 9am to get all the equipment in the van and set off on the drive to Brussels for the first gig of the two-month tour. Then they went their separate ways into the spring afternoon.

Graeme got back to his flat in about two hours' time, having stopped on the way at the pub and the grocery store. Tipsy, arms full of groceries, he slipped on something on the kitchen floor and nearly fell. It was a sheet of plain paper which bore an intriguing message in hilariously cliche letter cutouts from women’s magazines — different from the spindly calligraphic handwriting on Imani and Flora's note, but bearing a strikingly similar message:

_CAREFUL, NANCY_

The only thing to do about it was laugh. So that was what he did. He laughed while he put _Slanted and Enchanted_ on the tape player, and he laughed while he put the groceries away, and he laughed hardest of all when he stuck the note on the fridge with a magnet and stepped back to admire the deep black humor of it in the golden sunset light. But that night before he went to bed he did cast a few complicated spells in order to lock the door as securely as was possible.

\---

\--

-


	7. 7.

**7.**

**June 1993**

\--

Waking up on the bathroom floor of a Parisian hotel seemed appropriately decadent, like he was Oscar Wilde or one of the Symbolists or something after a long night spelunking stratospheric reaches with the green fairies. What was less edifying was the fact that Sal had woken him up by kneeling quietly beside him on the ornate, bleachy tiles and gently feeling for the pulse in his throat, so that Graeme surfaced from these black dreams to the sight of Sal hovering over him in the harsh light, looking equal parts embarrassed and relieved. “We have to go,” Sal said.

Graeme’s throat felt sand-textured. “What?”

“We have to drive home. Where’s your stuff?”

Sal went into the bedroom to pack everything up while Graeme got to his feet, bracing himself against the counter. The tile grout had imprinted against his cheek; his eyes were red; his hair was beyond attempting to fix. Some rough memories of the night previous manifested slowly in brutal glimmers. He didn't even want to think about what Sal was probably finding in the other room, so he didn’t. Worst of all, when he stepped back, he nearly slipped and fell on the two-way mirror. When he crouched to pick it up he saw there was a big spiderwebbing crack across the surface. He must have passed out holding it and it had consequently fallen from his loose grip onto the tiles and broken.

Sal had Graeme’s guitar and his backpack and was waiting for him by the door. “Ready?”

Graeme jammed the broken two-way mirror in his pocket. He was right in the weird gully between high and low where he couldn't worry about it. “Ready,” he told Sal.

The hallway was narrow and smelled like mothballs, and the elevator was broken so they were obliged to stumble hungoverly down six flights of moldy concrete stairs, haphazardly and trippily magicked against the side of the building to conform to various fire codes. The wizarding district of Paris, sandwiched between the third and eleventh arrondissements at the end of a series of winding mews and back streets, still consisted of pre-Revolution buildings in various states of catastrophic disrepair. Sal had made it very clear that he thought all the romantic decay was a ridiculous charade, but the previous afternoon he had insisted they go to Jim Morrison’s grave. Maybe that was why he’d assumed Graeme had prematurely joined the 27 Club. “Did you really think I was dead,” Graeme asked Sal on the third floor landing, where he was obliged to close his eyes and start feeling his way down the rest of the stairs before he threw up out of non-Euclidian vertigo.

“I knocked on the door for ten minutes,” Sal told him. “And then I came in, and I was yelling and everything, and you weren't moving.”

“I was asleep.”

“You were dead asleep.”

He thought he remembered drinking everything in the minibar. Not that there was really that much. It was hard to remember now exactly why he had done such a thing.

“I could feel that you were alive,” Sal explained for some reason. “You get a feel for death, you know, if you… I was just checking.”

“Well, I appreciate it.”

“The girls would never have forgiven you,” Sal told him, as though he didn’t already know this. “Either of us. They would never have forgiven me too by association.”

“There's always the nuclear option,” said Graeme.

“What?”

“Necromancy!”

“I’m not confident enough in my ability to bring back all your lunacy,” Sal said. “You can open your eyes now.”

Out on the street, the bleary morning wobbled like an unset jello. Imani and Flora had gone around the corner to the boulangerie for croissants, though they’d already eaten most of them. “This one had the TV on as loud as it would go,” Sal lied easily, rolling his eyes, “blaring French rap videos…”

Graeme shrugged. “I love that song ‘Bouge de la.’”

They found it on the radio heading out of town. It was mid-June and heavy, heavy, heavy. The countryside on the way to Calais was deep green, flat and endless under the grey sky, rolling out like an abstract tapestry or an unfinished computer animation comprising only the vague suggestions of natural shapes and forms…

Graeme settled his burning forehead against the cool window. He wasn't necessarily proud that the entire European tour had been a drunken blur, but it could hardly have been anything else. They’d taken the ferry to the continent in mid-April and two months had promptly disappeared into the road. Green rooms, interviews, photoshoots, hotels… spring clawing its way desperately into the flat grey light except in the highest mountain passes. Every journalist asked them to respond to some or another new potshot from Drought of Living Death; every backstage area was stocked with gin, a couple bumbling beefy security guys hired by Hellfire Club post-D&R incident, and at least a handful of fans who had managed to make their way through whatever scant protections in search of autographs or flirtation; every day was whiled away driving, driving, driving, driving, so that eventually even the most beautiful scenery imaginable felt like being in that scene in _A Clockwork Orange_ … Even the nearest miss of the whole two months, a package full of cursed beetles delivered to their backstage area in Zurich and somehow sensed and disposed of by Sal before the little creatures could escape and eat them all alive starting with the eyes, had felt like little more than a vaguely intriguing blip in the endless static.

Maybe it had something to do with the wringer, or the low roiling undercurrent of fear, or otherwise with the long period of stasis, but the shows had sounded and felt ferocious. Indeed, a bootleg cassette recording from Tallinn was swiftly duplicated and swapped widely among wizarding rock circles in Europe and beyond, so that you could get it at Everynight Music in Seattle by the end of the summer if you knew who to ask. The setlist that spring included most of _Severe Asceticism_ , a seething new cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Mr. Jones,” and the bones of the songs that would become “Moon and Moor” and “Blood Red.” These got a little more fleshed out in soundcheck, when they weren’t delving into half-hour jam sessions, many of which, luckily, Moira recorded on a little cassette deck from the sound booth.

It was basically the only time in any given day that Graeme felt like the spin cycle of reality stopped short and sent them spilling out blind with dizziness into some new and heretofore untouched place. Like a field of fresh snow. They all brought bits and pieces — as simple as a chord progression, a drumbeat, a sound, the squall from a new pedal — and shuffled them into nebulous thirty-minute arrangements, sometimes laughing, often stumbling, somebody (usually Imani) hearing the ghost of a song and orchestrating the rest of them into a shambolic attempt at replicating the music that was playing in somebody else’s mind… And then the stage manager would apologetically tell them they were going to have to open the doors in ten minutes and could they please wrap it up? And the spin cycle began again. These soundcheck sessions, though none of the four of them knew they were even recorded, sourced another third of the 1996 LP _Spite!_ , including the breakneck, unraveling album closer “The Hatchet.” Another two or three of the jams couldn’t be molded into Saint Rose songs because Graeme had pitched the best riffs into drop D and brought them to Alex for the second Crucia record, _Vengeance II_.

There were two more shows left of tour, now, the coming Friday and Saturday in London, at D&R, with Double Double and the Sluagh opening. Jack Childermass was out of prison as of April, and he and Ras were supposedly coming on Saturday for the grand finale. And then… it remained to be seen what would happen then. Graeme knew abstractly that they had a few dates lined up at the relevant wizarding summer festivals. And after that, Evvy at Hellfire Club had mentioned something about booking recording time at Wormwood in South London in September, after festival season had died down. She had also mentioned something about how operating as recording members of the band rather than just touring hands might impact Graeme and Sal’s respective contracts by entitling them to a cut of record sales. Winding down to the end of the endless and torturous tour, all Graeme could think was that another album inevitably meant another spin cycle. Maybe even a longer spin cycle. Nobody had yet evoked the specter of touring America, and yet it was inevitable, with the relevant U.S. wizarding music press calling up the Hellfire Club offices for interviews and radio spots with growing regularity.

Sometimes over the course of the spin cycle, Graeme had thought about working up enough nerve to tell Imani, I think I should go home for a while. Just a week or so, maybe; you'd hardly notice I was gone… It had been a recurring fantasy on the endless highway. The breeze off the sound whispering in the pines and the clouds pulling apart quickly against the great blue curtain of summer sky. Finally hearing all the music everybody had been talking about all this time: shows at the Den and Skookum House and Alki Gallery, jamming with Alex in the living room with a joint and a cup of tea, sitting in with Lockett and Kyla’s new band… Swimming in Lake Washington, kayaking in Lake Union, breakfast at Portage Bay, driving over Route 2 or Route 20 into the Cascades or taking the ferry over the sound and into the Olympics and the rainforest. Bringing flowers to Wray’s grave in Bellevue, wandering on the beach on the fog… Seeing Alex’s face. Seeing Lockett's face! It had been fifteen months since he had been home and either it had finally finished hollowing him out inside or, worse, the homesickness was just over, because he had no home anymore… but every time he had nearly spoken to Imani about it, he had decided that going home for a week and only a week would be unparalleled psychic torture and chickened out. Sitting in the bed alone in some anonymous hotel room, going through mini bottles of booze with alacrity, thinking, _why can’t I just be happy to be in the best band in the world?_

\--

London was London. Graeme slept for twenty hours and woke up around noon on Thursday to the sound of the phone ringing off the hook. It was Sal. “Pub?”

“Please.”

“Seven?”

“Right.”

He left home around six to walk there the long way. Everything was flat. It just needed a little more time and a little more sleep and a couple stiff drinks to get the color back, or at least that was what he was telling himself. The early summer was grey and sticky. People in assorted staid fashions bustled past, sweating off their makeup and pomade, jostling him like he wasn’t there. Kids in Suede shirts looked him up and down judgmentally and whispered among their friends. (The grunge look was going out of style with the advent of Britpop but Graeme wasn't about to wear what the Londoners called a ‘football jersey.’) Someone drove by playing the Kinks: “I’m a twentieth century man and I don't want to die here…”

He walked past graveyards, churches, parks, construction sites; stopped in a cornershop and got a beer in a brown paper bag and a Cadbury chocolate bar; watched a bunch of people in fancy dress swanning around outside an art gallery while cameras flashed. He went to the record store around the corner from the pub he and Sal frequented on the Green Lanes near Clissold Park, bought the new Blur and Slowdive albums on cassette for opposition research purposes, and then headed to the bar, where the bartender saw him and promptly lined up two shots of whiskey and a lager. “You look like you could use it,” she said.

Indeed he could. He had no sooner made it through the shots and half the beer before Sal showed up and got similar treatment. Then they settled into their standard table in the dim back corner. “You look like shit,” said Sal. “What’ve you got?”

“So do you,” Graeme said, passing the tapes across the table to Sal. Indeed, for the first time in their acquaintance, Sal’s facial hair was less than perfect.

“Do you actually like these bands,” Sal asked, flipping the cassettes in his fingers with his customary air of aloof judgement.

“Right now I don’t think I like any music at all,” Graeme told him, “even our own.”

“Yeah. I feel that. Moira put on the new Dinosaur Jr. at home, and you know I usually think they’re alright, but I had to leave the room. In fact, that was three hours ago. I’ve just been aimlessly walking around.”

“Me too.”

Sal chugged the rest of his beer. “Want another?”

“I had one on the way here.”

“So did I. Want another?”

Graeme did. Sal came back with four. When two of the four were nearly gone, Sal said, “Can I tell you something?”

“Anything.”

Sal sucked his teeth. Through the beginnings of a good old fashioned drunken haze Graeme realized he’d never seen Sal look quite so unsure. “I have a bad feeling,” he said finally.

“About what?”

“Whatever’s next. I dunno. The shows, maybe.”

A little cool dread was circling in Graeme’s gut like a pair of sleek sharks having detected the precise electrical frequency of blood. “Why?”

“I dunno.” Sal shrugged. “That’s the worst thing. It could be just a general overall bad feeling engendered by two months of not sleeping and behaving badly and deafening ourselves every night whilst generally endeavoring to evade our would-be assassins.”

“Maybe you just need to sleep it off.”

“Yeah.” Sal went on to the next beer. “After this, this coming weekend… I think we all need a bloody sabbatical.”

Graeme put his head on the table. “What about Evvy’s plan? Wormwood Studios, the new album, you know…”

Sal sighed long-sufferingly. Outside the end of the light was spreading like melted butter over the sticky street. “Let a man dream,” he groaned.

Graeme got home around ten, locked the door, collapsed in his bed without taking his shoes off and slept until around noon the next day. _Souvlaki_ on the tape player, cold shower, late lunch, gin and tonic. He got dressed, opting for Wray’s black suit with the wide satin lapels over his Pavement shirt and green Converse sneakers, and took the tube over to Oxford Circus around six. Sal and Moira were already at D&R, and Imani and Flora showed up within the hour. They answered some questions for the _Prophet_ arts section and for a girl with a tape recorder who claimed to be representing one of the more established Hobgoblins fanzines, glad-handed the label execs and VIP well-wishers in the balcony, sneakily downed shots in dressing rooms and the downstairs bar. Two to go, Graeme thought, watching Double Double’s youthful verve and pluck with a numb, distracted envy.

On stage, at least he could put it all in the music. Exhaustion, loneliness, numbness, homesickness… it made the songs feel sick and gummy-slow, staggering toward a bed to lie down. They were all tired of the tour, tired of the album, tired of the set. Tired, in Imani and Flora’s case, of reliving the experiences that had inspired each song over and over and over again until the groove wore out and rendered everything white noise. Maybe it would be for the best to record a new album, Graeme thought, shattering the solo at the end of “The Undertaker” into millions of sparking pieces. Maybe it would be good to force themselves to feel something new, even just for a while, until it all got sucked into the inevitable spin cycle…

The crowd roared into every silence with that same wave of love somehow undiminished by time or familiarity. They sang along to the old songs and listened raptly to the new ones. They laughed at every one of Flora’s little jokes and stood on their tiptoes to crane for a look at Graeme’s pedalboard. They were such an unwarranted blessing. They were so happy to be where they were that they couldn’t help but be infectious. He reached into that happiness and let it lift him up. He could tell that Imani and Flora and Sal did too.

There was a moment in which he understood that it was all going to be alright. Then — of course — the curse came alive.

It was difficult to say what the curse felt like. It was like nothing that Graeme had ever felt before. Something about reality seemed to cleave and tear, and all of a sudden the room around them was desperately, horribly alive. Like some great animal with a cavernous, broken chest, lying in the dirt and dying. Sal’s drums clattered to a shocked halt first, breaking one spell and giving way to another. The room seemed to gasp for a deep yogic inhale, held it, exhaled, and shrunk.

It was a very complex and very ancient curse, or so they later learned. It dated from an era before magic was formally harnessed, before the witch burnings and the resulting international statues of secrecy. Scholars were divided as to what exactly it had been used for in those days. Possibly it had been an early killing curse, when applied to the human body instead of a building or structure. Others claimed it would have been used in burials, to shrink objects (including living things) to be left with the dead in the tomb. This version had been adapted and developed and possibly cast by a large number of people: it would have taken at least four witches and wizards working within the day’s parameters of magic expression to create and execute the entire work. Once actualized, the curse had been deployed by one person, using a talisman, similar to the foiled attack in December. Separate talismans had been deployed to levy the curse sealing the doors at the back of the concert hall: the first recorded instance of the use of the nigh-unbreakable locking curse that would be recycled in several major attacks and battles throughout the conflict in the late nineties. Disconcertingly, none of the major known blood-purist extremist groups in the U.K. publicly took responsibility for the attack. In fact, nobody ever did.

In the moments before panic there was a great disbelieving stillness, as though everybody in that room was pinching themselves to check that they were not dreaming. Imani met Graeme’s eyes and somehow he found her often-illegible expression very clearly readable. Conviction, certainty, fear. A pure, high, needling note of regret that petrified him to see. Then her gaze shifted over his shoulder and transformed swiftly into rage. Graeme turned quickly enough to see a figure in a dark green suit disappearing into the shadowy wings.

Another struggling breath, another terrible contraction. The curtain fell cataclysmically. Then the screaming started.

There was a wash of primal fear that ripped through Graeme's entire being. _We’re all going to die here and this is our tomb_. Then, on its heels: _No, we’re not. We can’t._ It cleared like a thunderstorm.

Sal was out from behind the drum kit. Graeme practically threw his guitar on the floor. He never saw it again. They gathered in the middle of the stage and hashed it all out mostly subconsciously.

“ — saw this guy in the wings — ”

“ — we’ll go after him, you two — ”

“Something’s wrong with the doors, Sal — ”

“ — just keep people from fucking crushing each other — ”

“Right — okay, stay alive…”

Those were Graeme's last words to Imani and Flora for two years. He and Sal slipped out together through the opening in the moth-eaten red velvet curtain and into general bedlam. The sold-out room had shrunken by probably two cubic feet, and it was beginning to get tight. Most of the concertgoers had poured toward the doors in the back of the room, only to find that they couldn’t get through. A few others had been left in the wake of the stampede, crumpled and broken on the floor.

“Graeme,” Sal shouted over the roar of panic. “The doors!”

He didn't need telling twice. The room took another breath and collapsed one shoulder at a time, like a shot horse. There was a chorus of abject screaming. He knew already that that was the sound he would remember in his dreams until the day he died. Nobody could have heard it and not been changed.

Winnowing through the desperate, seething crowd around the doors, packed into the dissolving space like sardines in a can or else like cattle in the holding pen outside the slaughterhouse, was next to impossible until Graeme cast a few basic magnetization spells to get people to move out of his way, even if they didn’t want to. This close to the doors he could feel the magic that kept them locked. Reaching into it felt only like static. It was like someone had gotten into the basic atomic formulation of doors, the basic physical concept or the basic source code, and changed something indistinguishable at the root. They weren't so much locked as rewritten to be doors that did not open. He would’ve felt afraid, if he could; afraid of the magic, if not everything else. But all the fear had been gotten out in that single petrified moment earlier. Now all that was left was conviction.

Kelton, the second guitarist from the Sluagh, was pressed up against one of the doors with the four members of Double Double, who had been standing in the front row by Graeme’s monitor. They pulled him into their little huddle as the room shivered closer another few inches. Beyond the heads of the surrounding throng Graeme could feel Sal’s magic, healing, lifting, shifting. Much later he would learn that Sal and Moira, with help from a few audience members, had saved possibly hundreds of lives simply by levitating people and stacking them on top of each other. Graeme turned to Kelton. “Have you tried — ”

“Every unlocking spell we know,” said Kelton, shaking his head.

The bassist from Double Double was a quiet androgynous person who reminded Graeme of Marsden. They piped up, reedy voice hoarse from shouting. “It’s like a variation on the Unbreakable Vow,” they said. “Adapted to hold objects together rather than, like, to seal a promise.”

“Key’s our magical theory ace,” said the drummer, Jessie.

“I can’t break it,” the bassist went on. “I don’t think anybody can break it. That’s the point of the Unbreakable Vow.”

Graeme hadn’t even heard of the Unbreakable Vow, let alone an adapted physical variant thereof. Perhaps this was simply owing to the quality of American public magical education, which regularly rated below par with the wizarding public schools of most other nations with an organized unit of magical governance. At Denny Academy in magical theory club they had studied a list of curses commonly deemed unbreakable and had debated it fiercely. The number of Latinate spells without exploitable weaknesses could be counted on one hand. Other curses had been considered unbreakable for centuries until somebody had simply approached the process differently, as had been famously illustrated by the cursebreaker Gray Lewis’s infamous 1952 shattering of the sleeping curse that had been cast on all the female issue of the wizarding House of Eustace, for which he had been presented with numerous awards and accolades that had been withdrawn in a subsequent scandal.

Graeme bit his lip hard and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans. He knew this was going to hurt (perhaps not as much as it eventually did). “I’ll be right back,” he said.

Kelton and the Double Double kids exchanged shocked looks. “You can’t be — ”

He was already gone.

To the others, it appeared that his eyes turned white and he swayed on his feet, like a building in an earthquake, or a flagpole in a stiff wind. With nothing else to do, they propped him up between them.

When you had enough magical theory to know what you were looking for down there in the pit, a curse had a shape. Some people said it was like a wall. Other people said it was like thick winter lake ice seen from below — cold, warped, blurring the light. Maybe it was a basement. A childhood bedroom. The middle school locker you’d been shoved into one too many times by overzealous bullies. A curse was a trap. If you touched the trap the wrong way, it was liable to close on you. Graeme had only done this a handful of times before, usually on magic he himself had cast (including, most recently, the hexed two-way mirror), and he'd found himself in one of the supervised werewolf cells, or in the little exam room at Planned Parenthood in the Central District where they made you sit in humiliated misery while they ran all your STD cultures, or, once, memorably, in Montclair’s room at the Den, slipping in the fresh blood on the floor…

This curse was different. It was very deep and very old, very still. Like a clear, cold spring. In the fragile place at the center of it, Graeme went into a white room which was empty except for a person with tangled reddish hair. He was in a threshold that was not a doorway, and as he stepped inside the void closed around him. The person with the tangled hair was sitting in a rigid metal chair with their back to him. He understood that their face was something he should not see. If he was lucky he would only be turned to stone. He went up behind this person close enough to hear their breathing, which was the sound that moved inside all living and unliving things. The low, continuous drone of the universe expanding. He knew what he had been sent to do without knowing or seeing or ever having been told: it came to him like a memory from before he was even alive. He stood as close to the sound as he could stand and slid his fingers into this person’s hair.

It was neither soft nor coarse, warm nor cool, but somehow touching it hurt. It didn’t hurt like any customary heretofore felt hurt of body. It seeped in through the pads of his fingers but the pain was not there. It got a fist round his heart and squeezed. It was the oldest and the most pure pain that could be called to human memory. Shining golden grief. As though — and he had not done this — he had put it all away and now it had broken all its bonds at once. It flooded him like the ancient Lake Pend Oreille breaking its ice dam and roaring scars across the high scabland. His vision warped and blurred. He forced his fingers into the first knot and gentled it against his thumb until the fine strands loosened. Having never actually done this before — combed someone’s hair. Someone — difficult to remember who now, or perhaps it didn’t matter — had combed his hair for him before. Many others had held it back for him while he threw up: Alex, Wray, Lockett, Sal…

He himself hated to be touched like this, he thought — he thought? He felt the curse bind the ever-repressed thought in these waterlogged old ropes and drag it into the forefront of his mind, like a shark in a squid net. He loosened another knot as gently as he could, with all the care he could muster. The curse rubbed his face in it, like a badly-behaved puppy: he himself hated to be touched like this. With care, with gentleness. He just laid there hating it, sometimes. Hating it until it was everything he could think about. Who would do such a thing? Why?

Grief ransacked him inside out. Then guilt, ever on its clattering tap heels. He bit his lip hard, tasted blood. Carded fingers through the fine red mane left of this person’s part, where it was fully untangled. Then he started on the right.

Guilt. The guilt was something else. Usually he drank this flat. Their names and faces filtered into his mind again. Alex, Wray, Sal, Imani, Flora, Lockett —

He thought of Lockett in his old room at the Den. No one lived there anymore. There was no window in that room. Drunk, guiltily, he’d thought about what might’ve happened if he’d ever slept over. How they would’ve woken up in the morning. How they would’ve woken up at all being as the room had no window. Like a coffin. He wondered if Lockett ever dreamed about being dead. Before every stupid terrible thing Graeme had done, he had gone with Lockett once to the hospital on First Hill. Sat in the waiting room dodging the sympathetic glances of other people who had come with friends and lovers who were dying of AIDS. Felt like he ought to say or wear something so that everyone knew — well. Lockett had come out looking like a disintegrating ice sculpture and he himself had known the same way everybody else did.

On the street together Graeme said, “How’s the cells?”

“What? Fine. Cells.”

“So — ”

“Still. Hovering.”

Obviously he didn’t feel like talking. Except when they got to the diner and Lockett said, “Actually, I’m going home.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

You love that more than me, he had been thinking, guiltily. But of course Lockett did. Presumably heroin made him feel good. Yet to be seen if Graeme could actually make Lockett feel anything except… who knew? Pity?

Can you make anyone feel anything at all except burdened? the person with the tangled hair asked him, without speaking. Except sorry for you?

It would take allowing yourself to be worth any worth, said the person with the tangled hair. Can you stand to be worth tenderness? Can you stand to be worth anything at all?

He rolled the last knot carefully in his fingers and teased his way into it where he could pinch the knotted strands apart. His hands were shaking almost too violently to manage the intricate work.

After parting ways with Lockett at the diner he had gone home alone. Laid in bed — Wray’s bed — and fallen asleep. Woken up breathing hard, sweating, in about an hour, jerked off, couldn’t shake it, went to Cal’s. Cal had clearly been kind of surprised, because it had been a little while since Graeme had come over, and it would be another little while after this, because Cal had said something like, “I need a break from you endlessly flagellating yourself with my dick.” Cal was with this girl, a journalist; she said she was going out to get cigarettes. Graeme pretty much threw himself down on the kitchen floor, because Cal for all his purported sex positivity was kind of a purist about some things and took real convincing not to fuck in bed. Afterward Cal said, What’s gotten into you? A state of utter fragmentation, Graeme had endeavored to communicate by vague expressions of disjointed shrugs and eyebrows, obviously a total psychic break, dissolution, as the Modernists called it, violent self-mitosis, in that he thought he remembered having felt, at the moment of — whatever — something so — (Emily Dickinson dashes) — something heavier than liquid mercury… It was raw, bloody longing and it was coming from that most abject chamber of his heart. Howling sick longing for something within reach — at the edge of his self — at the edge of certainty even now —

For someone who wants to be loved so badly, the person with the tangled hair said without speaking, you sure do hate yourself.

How do you figure that?

The last tangles eased apart. He could’ve screamed with relief. Carefully he combed his fingers through this person's hair, from the soft strands behind their ear to the rough split ends. As he did he felt the room dissolve around him, and then they floated together in a still and silent space of no color, no being, a deep vertiginous everythingness — and at last the person with the tangled hair was gone. All was — or nothing was — only still. Then the clock started working — it was ticking in front of his face —

\--

As she and Flora ran off from the stage into the wings, Imani managed a quick little thank you to whatever cosmic arbiters had swayed her to wear her Adidas sneakers instead of the strappy red leather espadrilles she’d considered that afternoon, sitting on the floor of the closet in their bedroom at home, listening to the new Slowdive on the Muggle radio, mouth tasting like Flora and a post-coital clove cigarette…

How could one day happen in two separate worlds? There was no time to worry about it now.

The man in the green suit. She'd noticed movement in the wings toward the beginning of “Feast Day,” but figured it was one of the sound or lighting guys coming down to fix something backstage; they were frequently obliged to do this when magic overloaded the Muggle equipment. Then the jolt. No other word for it — the rift, the changing. The end. The beginning. The curse. And that face stirring out of the darkness just over Graeme's shoulder. The shock, the fear, the terror; it all got bowled over pretty quick by the conviction, like candlepins loaded for children.

Down the half-set of low stairs from the wings off the stage, the hallway split, running either out to the concert hall or down toward the stairs to the dread sub-basements. “He won’t be going out there,” Flora said, coming up behind Imani. “The doors… He’s got to be going — ”

“ — to the door to the paint shop!”

They headed down to the right, the sounds of their running footsteps echoing. Even the hallway had shuddered and twisted and collapsed incrementally by force of the spell. Flora, Imani realized belatedly, was running in three-inch heels. Suddenly she threw an arm across Imani’s chest.

“What?”

“Tripwire.”

“Where?”

Flora neutralized it with a spell. Imani didn’t even see it until the fine blue flame of Flora’s magic erased it from existence. “Let’s go. Keep your eye out.”

Imani had only been down here into the deepest D&R basements once, with Evvy and Croydon, to investigate the aftermath of the December incident. Graeme had described it as “the kind of place where joy goes to die.” Evvy had explained that it was possible this part of the venue had been used for gladiatorial contests between wizards and magical creatures as recently as the 1920s. The curse had warped and concentrated all the ancient, evil magic semi-contained within the sloppily stuccoed walls into a throttling and omnipotent energy that was powerful enough to feel like it was physically manifest. The walls themselves were swarming with men in green suits. The faces of all the men who had ever leered at her on the street and in the clubs; all the guys who used to stand outside the windows of the school pool, watching the girls at gym class; all the prison guards at Byberry who took an unnecessarily long time to pat down her hair and her hips; all the white women who had ever looked down their noses at her with undisguised disgust; everybody who had ever spat at her feet… All the horrible-strange death-mask un-faces turning and twisting into darkness, pressing ever closer, reaching beyond their semi-permeable imprisoning membrane with dastardly claws…

The curse twisted its terrible crank and pulled the hallway tighter. Flora, uncharacteristically, let out a short, sharp scream. Imani clutched her hand. Not far now, not far now…

They came stumbling into the room at the end of the hall, the room with the door, with the crescent-shaped concrete patch on the floor from December, as the hallway shrunk tightly enough that they were obliged to duck their heads. Imani knew even before she stepped into that room that something was wrong; she could feel it. The door was locked.

She and Flora looked back down the hallway and she felt them understand simultaneously that there wasn't going to be enough time to make it all the way back out into the great room again before they were both crushed. Their hands were squeezed together so tightly that it hurt, but the hurt was good. It was clean and bright. It swept through the sudden crushing wave of near-paralyzing fear, and it revealed a single and inescapable truth:

“Flor,” Imani said, swallowing. “I need to tell you that I lo— ”

There was a great and sudden fission of magic, like an unexpected change in gravitational direction. It had the cool astringency of gin and rain and there was a deep, echoing, vengeful sound to it that could only be heard in the deepest recesses of the mind. It could only have been Graeme's magic. It shoved in the portal to the paint shop with such force that it blew the door from its hinges and slammed it against the opposite wall in the shop basement, shattering glass and sending up a wrath of hideous dust. And, best of all, startling somebody who had been hiding there, sending them scampering for the wobbly spiral staircase toward the street level.

Their hands wrenched apart. Flora sent spells flying toward the figure on the stairs, but they refracted off an invisible shield he must have been wearing or carrying, sending the magic boomeranging around the little dark room, dislodging barrels of powdered pigments from their storage shelves and sending them shattering to the floor in great festive clouds of color. Imani tried to quickly Apparate into the street level of the shop, but couldn't get the magic to catch, so settled for chasing the man in the green suit up the spiral staircase. Flora followed, reaching up to seal the trapdoor at the top of the stairs with a quick spell, but green suit broke it like it was made of balsa wood. They burst into the shop one after the other, covered in soot and dust and paint, scaring the daylights out of the stoned teenage clerk.

Flora sent a hex from behind Imani toward green suit, but he blocked it, toppling a few easel sets into their path and lobbing another hex in their direction. Imani barely pulled a shield up in time, narrowly dodging the scintillating ball of deep envy-green light. The clerk screamed. Flora yelled something in the order of, “Lock the fucking door and call the fucking MLE!” But the first one was quickly moot — green suit shattered the glass in the front window with a curse and dove through the jagged void out onto the streets of Muggle London — and Imani didn't know if the clerk had gotten their wits about them enough to do anything about the second one before they followed him.

Being as it was a warm and clear summer Friday night, Soho was thronged with people. Mews pubs overflowing into the street, paparazzi flashing around the Muggle clubs. Teenagers in bucket hats and Britpop t-shirts enviously studied designer fashions in carefully curated window displays, and graffiti taggers wandered the shadows in loose packs, clutching brown-bagged beers and spray paint cans. Scant stars and a wedge of moon appeared above amidst the movement of the thin, reddish clouds against the darkness. And in the melee of it all two fabulously dressed, filthy, terrified young women chased after a man in some kind of chartreuse snakeskin getup whose face nobody could quite remember, later.

They cornered him amidst construction sites and old brownstones in a residential mews off Broadwick Street. Imani’s eyes met his, and she felt a moment of terrible recognition. She had never seen this face before, but perhaps she had seen him with another. And even if she hadn’t, she had certainly seen his conviction. She had seen it in herself.

She was halfway through the incantation to prevent Apparition when he disappeared in a shower of sparks.

\--

Since the moment he had lurched into consciousness on the sidewalk across the street from the shrunken wreck of Dyatlov & Roswell, into a symphony of shouts and sirens, looking into Sal and Moira and Kelton’s petrified faces and hardly recalling their names, feeling like he’d been beaten to a pulp and run over by two double-decker buses in quick succession, Graeme’s nose had not stopped bleeding. Dimly he was aware that there was a great deal of waffling and uncertainty going on, and that there were a lot of people shouting. One of them was Sal, who kept saying something like, "Are we being charged with a crime? What crime are we being charged with?” And a couple other people, who kept saying things like, “We need you to get in the van,” in increasingly threatening tones.

So they got in the van. Or, Sal and Kelton basically carried Graeme into the van, and then he fell asleep again against Moira's shoulder, except that the sleep was so still and cold that somebody kept waking him up again with magic. “You need to stay with us,” Moira said. She was rubbing his back. He felt another little jolt, like an injection of caffeine to the vein. Then he became aware that the reason it was snuffly to breathe was that Sal was holding a handkerchief up to his face because his nose was gushing blood.

“Where’s Imani and Flora,” Graeme managed.

“We don’t know.”

There were no windows. _Like a coffin_. And the light overhead was greasy and thin and trembled with every pothole they hit. The fear shared among the four of them was so palpable as to taste like something familiar, or perhaps that was just the quantity of blood in his throat.

“Where are we going?”

“We don't know.”

“Is anybody dead?”

He watched Sal and Moira and Kelton look between each other. “There were maybe five people who just weren't moving,” Kelton said.

“Two people are dead,” Sal told them. How did he know? It didn’t seem strange, then, not whatsoever, how certain he was. “There’s two more… I just don’t know. Actually, I think one of them is you, Graeme.”

“Sal…”

“He’s getting a little brighter. Moira, if we’re going where I think we’re going it’ll come out, it doesn’t matter…”

After an indeterminable time they were herded out of the van, down a long, dark hallway in which the sound of their footsteps echoed and multiplied so that they sounded like some great beast or avenging army, down a long, dark elevator shaft, down another long, dark hallway, and into a series of strange and featureless rooms, lit by floating fluorescent orbs that seared every shadow from existence. By this point Graeme didn’t necessarily feel like he was very alive. Nothing seemed fully dimensional. It was like he was lying in bed, eyes closed, on the edge of sleep, and somebody else was reading the whole story to him…

“My friend needs a doctor,” he heard Sal say. “Urgently. Ideally, a fucking half-hour ago before you made us walk all the way down here without telling us where we are or what we’re being — ”

There was a new voice — a woman’s voice with a very posh accent. “You're not being charged with anything.”

“Denying medical care in an internment setting is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,” said Moira.

“This isn't an interment setting,” said the woman. “And — you ought to know this — no wizarding governments signed onto the Geneva Conventions.”

“You can't take his fucking statement if he dies,” Sal argued. He was grasping at straws now. “And he broke the curse on those doors.”

It doesn't matter, Graeme thought, they can just do the spell history. Moira was rubbing his back still. He could feel her magic, its roiling simmer, its warmth and rage, but there was nothing left inside of him for it to prop up. Where the glowing well of his own magic had been there was a deep, raw, aching wound, numb when he touched it, like the crater of a missing tooth.

“Mr. Abidi, we’ll take you back first,” said the woman, as though she had registered none of the previous conversation. “Ms. Devlin, Mr. Murphy, you’ll go with Detective White.”

“What about Graeme?”

“We’ll take Mr. Sugarbush next.”

“I’m telling you, by the time you get back out here — ”

“We've sent for a medic,” said the woman sternly. “Crabbe, Remington, help me out…”

They must have muscled Sal through some door because the sounds of his protestations were cut off quite suddenly as though with a knife. Some last drop of instinct to fight forced Graeme's eyes open, but he was alone. The space was violently unmemorable, not unlike the waiting room at the supervised transformation cells back home in Seattle, and the light suspended from the ceiling was blinding.

He had the dread thought again: _We’re going to die here and this is our tomb._ But he couldn’t even summon fear about it, anymore. He felt his head loll back against the concrete wall. There was not much feeling left in his feet or his hands. He was shrinking. He reminded himself to breathe. He exhaled into a great collapse. First one shoulder, than the other. His lungs tightened into clenched fists.

There was a lot that he regretted, he figured, forcing another breath into his chest. Feebly the jukebox in his brain dropped the needle where it always landed on the same Slint song: _I’m trying to find my way home — I'm sorry — and I miss you —_

He closed his eyes again and let the imagined noise wash over him until it felt real.

_I miss you — I’ve grown taller now —_

The noise carried him home. Across the sea. The wind in the pines. The veil of clouds slipping from the mountains over the sound and the city. Long late morning lying in bed listening to the secrets in the rain.

He never let his brain so much as touch things like this, but it couldn’t hurt to imagine it now. Back then, that dark February, if he had been brave enough, in every conceivable way, to let go of the lifetime crutch, and hold on to the thing that he really wanted. For better or worse none of it would ever have happened and they would be holding each other now looking up through the grimy trailer window at the shadow of the moon against the mountains…

_I swear — I’ll make it up to you —_

God, but it would all be lost now. It was desperately unfair that Lockett would never know. He of all the people in this world deserved to know that he was loved so much. Maybe Alex would tell him. But how could Graeme put either of them through that — another funeral? It was unthinkable.

_I’ll make it up to you — I’ll make it up to you —_

He would have done anything for another chance. Probably everybody who had ever died had had this same thought right before the end. Just once. Just one more try, and I won't waste it, I swear I won’t waste it, just let me see him, just let me see home, just one more time…

_I miss you —_

The roar of imagined sound swamped and swallowed reality like some great wave. He went under into a kind of violent churning, and for a moment he thought it was the end, but it was in fact the opposite. By the time he realized it was real, he was already halfway across the world.

\--

Sal had inherited what he had always thought of as the switchboard in the back of his mind from his mother. At least, he thought so, because they had never talked about it, but there was nowhere else it could have come from. From his father, he had inherited his brown skin, eye for beauty, and an abiding hypnotic affection for the sound of the ancient Arabic lute called an _oud_. From his mother, he had inherited his magic and his awareness of death. As a child, becoming a necromancer had seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with such an interesting ability, and, in those days in Ireland, there was good money to be made by necromancers in looking for, and, if possible, communicating with the corpses of people who had been disappeared in the Troubles. But he didn't care to work for the police, and so, since that one ill-fated attempt with Cam Tower in the late seventies, he'd figured he was doomed to a terribly average existence as a half-blood wizard who happened to have a solid sixth sense for death that he could never talk about with anybody, not even the person who had given it to him in the first place.

In the interrogation rooms, wherever they were, likely somewhere in the endless maze of the underground Ministry of Magic, Sal reached into his mind for the switchboard, seeking the most important lights. Moira’s, Imani’s, Flora’s, Graeme’s. The latter was flickering ominously. “I am a citizen of another country, you know,” Sal told the interrogator.

“Ireland is still considered a part of the commonwealth by wizarding treaty,” the interrogator said dismissively. She was in a well-fitting grey skirt suit, and, intriguingly, sneakers, and her hair was icy blonde, with a few flyaways. The security guards by the door looked half asleep. They had hauled all these people out of bed for this, Sal realized. “Besides, we have emergency powers to hold potential combatants in instances of Dark Arts Terrorism.”

Sal’s brain was ringing alarm bells around _emergency powers_. Having grown up watching the impact of the Special Powers Act in the North, any Irish person’s would’ve. “What?”

The interrogator ignored him, turning instead to an unmarked manilla folder on the table before her and opening it with maximum ceremony. “Saladin O’Cuilleain Abidi,” she said.

Sal sighed. “Yes.”

“Your mother is Cliona O’Cuilleain — ” the Gaelic enunciated with the worst possible butchery — “and your father is Professor Mohammed Abidi.”

He knew where this was going. Inasmuch as his gut had been sinking for possibly the last four hours it started sinking even deeper. “Yes,” he said.

“Your father is registered as a Muggle, and your mother…”

“I don’t have any powers myself,” Sal told the interrogator. “It doesn’t pass on to sons.”

The interrogator ignored him. “Your mother is registered as a banshee.”

“Yes, she is, but like I said — ”

“Mr. Abidi, this is very concerning to us for a number of reasons…”

She went on to list them. Uncontrollable powers, unsanctioned necromancy, the possibility of accidental breaches between the living world and death… he had heard it all before. He was listening to the switchboard. Specifically, he was listening to Moira's heartbeat, as he had done in moments of great stress for many years, because he couldn't bear to listen to Graeme’s, which had been very fast, and which now was very slow.

He could feel death; he could feel the curtain that was sometimes open but usually closed and the cold river beyond…

“Are you listening?” said the interrogator.

“Of course. And like I said — ”

“Saladin, I have a police report from 1978 — you were arrested in a cemetery in someplace called… Boher… Boherna…”

“Bohernabreena,” said Sal, “and nothing came of it, you'd see that if you read any further — ”

“You had semi-successfully committed unauthorized level six necromancy,” said the interrogator. “Saladin, can you not understand how this might be concerning…”

Under Irish law, level six necromancy basically just meant some vague twitching, Sal thought poisonously. It was level four and above you had be worried about and that was reserved for the professionals. “And what about anything that happened tonight screams necromancy to you?”

“The mandate of this unit is to investigate Dark Arts Terrorism,” said the interrogator. “Necromancy is a Dark Art, is it not?”

“I don't think that’s why,” Sal said, trying and failing to keep his voice even. “I don’t think it has anything to do with my mother or with necromancy at all.”

"What do you think it has to do with?”

“That my father is an Iranian refugee. And his name’s Mohammed. That was on your paper too, wasn’t it?”

The interrogator closed her manilla folder with immensely choreographed care. “What are you insinuating.”

“You know damn well what I’m insinuating! This is just another racist, colonialist racket like every-bloody-thing else!”

He would have gone on for another twenty minutes, and had before in similar circumstances (shattered noise ordinances, state-mandated registration, a single regrettable drunk and disorderly arrest in Dublin one New Years’), were it not for what happened next. There was a great spike of energy out of the switchboard at the same time that someone in the next room fired a gun or dropped a dictionary on the floor from a height — a great crack, like a terrible whip, or an iceberg calving. And death moved away with a flash of bones. And Graeme's light was still on in the back of Sal’s mind.

The two beefy security lugs had burst into the holding room, and the woman interrogator followed. From behind them, Sal watched rage, and something else, not unlike fear, creep up the interrogator’s spine and settle into her shoulders. She wheeled on the muscle. “I thought you said this room was Apparition-proof!”

“It is, mum!”

“They just tested it yesterday.”

Sal peered over her shoulder into the holding room. Smoke was rising from what was left of the plastic chairs, most of which had melted into fluorescent goo on the cold concrete floor. The one-way mirror into the interrogation room was cracked in a spreading spiderweb, and the light overhead was swinging, like a clock’s pendulum. A burnt kind of lightning smell hung heavily in the still air. And Graeme was gone.

The interrogator’s eyes met Sal’s with an accusatory fire. All he could do was give her back a shit-eating grin.

\---

\--

-


	8. 8.

**8.**

\--

In process of Apparating all the way across the world, which he had actually done by somehow going through the world, or so the doctors would bewilderedly deduce in the days to come at the minute regional wizarding clinic in Moscow, Idaho, Graeme had left behind assorted bits and pieces, including but not limited to most of the flesh of his left thigh, the entire exterior manifestation of his left ear, two important bones (left collar, right shin) and six less important ones, and, vitally, two entire fingers on his left hand. There was an equation most wizarding students learned in school about the extent to which the benefits of instant travel outweighed the risks of catastrophic splinching. Quite simply it was more difficult to hold one’s body together over increasing distances. It was additionally difficult to hold one’s body together in instances of instinctive magic brought about by psychic trauma. And, as Graeme had experienced numerous times before, it was next to impossible to hold one’s body together if one had recently been drinking.

The way it happened was, he flashed out of being and into being. Birdcalls, trees. Then it hit him like twelve tons of bricks. It was like standing up too fast and the blood rushing to your head times infinity. Sensation caught up with the pieces of his body he had managed to keep together, kind of slamming into and through him, like diving into ice water, and discovered the pieces he hadn’t. He would have screamed, but he had also lost some vocal cords, which apparently was common and had been very easy to fix, or so he was told later. There was no single locus for where it hurt. In that it was rather like grief, but sharper. Everywhere, all-over, all-inside, not so much tearing or burning as having-been-torn and having-been-burned, raw, hollowing… It hurt desperately to breathe, because of assorted cartilages and tissues that were just gone. His face turned into the cool, wet earth. Loam, rain, a little old ash. Something was leaching up out of it, wrapping around him, like a cold compress, or a snail’s sticky trail, and he knew approximately where he was. It could only have been the Northwest — it could only have been home. He could have cried, except that there were also some of what the doctor later called “minor lacrimal disconnects.”

There was a silence and a brief peace in which the entire bruised and battered being which was Graeme was subsumed beneath the birth of a sub-Graeme operating only by necessary parts. The sonic boom of his Apparition diffused itself through the long valley; in the morning, Idaho Public Radio would play a message from the authorities that an avalanche cannon had been misfired in the night. Adrenaline put a kind of wet plaster pad over all the pain and lurched him upright-ish in the dirt. In the darkness there was a sound which swallowed everything, even the terrible blind rasping of his own breath. It must have been the river, and if it was the river —

Behind him a rickety door slammed open. A deep buttery floodlight spilled out into the darkness. _Oh, god_ , Graeme thought in the clearest corner of his beclouded mind, _oh no._

“Graeme?”

Reality moved like a slide projector. He was gathered into the arms of somebody who smelled like something burnt and dust. Like the aftershock of lightning. Somehow he understood with excruciating clarity the thing he wanted to know more than anything. Even if it was never said in so many words it was nearly enough just to know it then. He was floating in a kind of viking funeral vessel on the stormy sea of it. It was diffuse through all his blood and it was going to turn him into light if he only let it…

Lockett must have felt him go limp. He pulled back and Graeme watched him go through about ten stages of grief and horror in five seconds flat. “What happened?”

He couldn't say anything at all. His teeth had started chattering for some reason.

“Okay. It’s okay. You’re with me, and I’ve got you, and it’ll be okay.”

He did believe it, because he had to. He could feel himself floating away. If it was the last thing he ever believed it would be alright. There were a lot of things that there wasn’t going to be time to say. That was the worst part.

Lockett’s hands were on his face, a little roughly, slipping in all the blood, and his eyes fixed Graeme’s. “I have to get the portkey,” he said. “Can you hang on?”

He didn’t know if he could, but he knew he couldn’t lie, so he nodded.

“Okay. Hang on. I’ll be right back, okay, right back…”

It was likely that Graeme's life was saved by a then-new effort from the Idaho Magical Congress, which, after a series of preventable deaths from magical causes in rural areas of the state, had passed a bill providing every wizarding household in Idaho with an emergency portkey coded to the nearest regional clinic. Lockett had received his not six weeks previous, and he had put it behind the cereal boxes on top of the fridge. The Congress was notoriously short on cash and as such had tasked staffers to recycle anything they could get their hands on, so they had sent Lockett a kitschy paperweight meticulously enclosed in butcher paper. All you had to do in case of emergency was rip away the paper and touch the object, which would whisk you away to the clinic thirty seconds after contact had been initiated. Graeme would have bled to death if they had tried to drive, and possibly dissembled into irreparable pieces if Lockett had attempted to Apparate them together. Even making his own portkey would have cost them valuable time.

By the time Lockett got outside again he had to pull Graeme back up to sitting and slap him on the cheek before he came around a little. Not that Graeme remembered this very well later, but it was like being woken up again and again from a very deep sleep in a very dark room, in which nothing hurt, and everything was still. This room was different from the room of the curse, in the same way that black is different from white, in that one is the absence of color while the other is all color at once.

Lockett ripped the portkey out of the butcher paper, almost fumbled it because of all the blood on his hands, and reached for Graeme’s wrist in order to flop his limp hand onto the polished glass. In process of this, Graeme noticed the full extent of the damage to his left hand for the first time. His ring and pinky fingers were just gone, like they had been cut off with a surgical scalpel. It was like being doused with a bucket of cold water. “Oh, fuck,” he said, or that was what he tried to say, but it came out from his throat sounding decomposed.

“Don’t look at it,” Lockett said. “They’ll fix it.”

“But — ”

“They’ll fix it!” said Lockett. He put his hand over Graeme’s hand so that he couldn’t see and then he put his arm around Graeme’s back and rested Graeme’s forehead against his shoulder and Graeme could feel his heartbeat, and that he smelled like sleep, and that there was a fine tremor rising through his entire body. A single pure ninth chord of fear. They waited together in this fucked pieta as the midnight wind moved above them in the trees. _I can't die_ , Graeme thought, with a shocking clarity, _I can’t, I have to tell him something_ —

They flashed in and out of nowhere, and the last thing that Graeme knew for a while was that it had gotten light again, and they were falling from the ceiling.

\--

Somebody must have put the fast-forward clicker down on the VHS tape of reality. Lockett didn’t know how long he had been waiting there when the nurse came over. “Do you need help with your clothes,” she said gently. This was how he realized he was covered in Graeme’s blood.

“Oh — um. I didn’t — I can do it.”

“Let me know. I think I have sweats somewhere.”

She looked like she didn't want to say anything about the obvious matter at hand, but he asked her anyway. “Can you fix his hand.”

“We’ll try,” the nurse said. He was grateful for her blunt honesty. “It’s going to be less of a priority than the major magic shock, let alone reattaching the important bones and muscle groups.”

 _Magic shock?_ “There’s no point in fixing the rest of him if you can't fix his hand,” Lockett told her.

The nurse’s eyebrow cocked. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell the doctors. But can I ask you some things first?”

“Sure, I guess.”

She crouched beside him on the scuffed tiles and unpinched a badly chewed pen from the clip of her clipboard. “We got the heads-up from your portkey that one of you is Lockett Custer Schaff, from Riggins?”

“That’s me.”

“And what’s your friend’s name?”

“Graeme Sugarbush.” He watched her start to write it incorrectly on her notepad. “Graeme like G-R-A-E-M-E.”

“How old is Graeme?”

Lockett had to think about it for a minute. “Twenty-three.”

“Does he have any allergies that you know of? Standard or magical?” 

“I don't know.”

“Don’t suppose you know his blood type.”

“God, no.”

“Do you know if his parents — ”

“They live in Seattle — in Madrona. I don’t know them — sorry, I feel like I don't know anything…”

“That’s okay. We can look them up and try to get them here. You’re his — friend?”

This seemed like too much and not enough, and the nurse's pause seemed pointed. “Yeah,” he said.

“Do you have any idea how he — ”

“I heard the crack. It was — probably everybody in the valley heard it. Like somebody fired a shotgun next to my ear.”

“Did it wake you up?”

He had been awake for a few minutes, having thought he had heard something knocking on the door. “Yeah,” he lied.

“And — ”

“I went outside and —” The image flashed before his mind and he blinked it away. He remembered thinking, with a staggering clarity, _He’s going to die in my arms._ Then, on its heels, _He’s not. He can’t._ “I used the emergency portkey from the IMC.”

“Pretty much the only sensible law they’ve ever passed,” said the nurse. “We can reset it and give it back to you. Do you know where he Apparated from?”

“He was — this sounds — it’s not possible. He was in London this morning.”

“London…”

“London as in England.”

The nurse sat back on her heels. She didn’t look like somebody who was easily surprised. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Do you know why he came to you?”

“That’s why I think — he can’t have — you know, meant to do it.”

“That's not how Apparition works, Lockett. I’m not a theorist, but, even in cases of instinctive magic, intent is the most powerful magical modulator known to man. I mean, I could say the killing curse to you right now, and it wouldn't hurt you at all, because I wouldn’t mean it. But if I did mean it, if I really meant it, I could erase you from existence without even saying anything. If it’s true that Graeme Apparated to your home in Riggins from the other side of the world, we’ll probably find that he had to really, really, really mean to do it.”

“How would we know that?”

The nurse looked at him like this was very obvious. “We’ll ask him when he wakes up.”

“You think _when_.”

“Maybe I should have said _if_ for liability reasons, but, based on the scans, we’re looking at _when_ … it’ll be tough. He lost a great deal of blood. It’ll be a hard recovery, probably PT, for his leg and his hand, at least. But, likely, _when_. Altogether it wouldn’t be the worst splinching I’ve seen somebody survive.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, Lockett, this is Idaho. At least he didn’t lose any of his brain.” She clasped his shoulder, sharing a sympathetic smile. “You should clean up. I’ll be at the front desk if you need help. It’s fine if you want to go home, we can send you with a two-way mirror — ”

“That’s alright, I’ll stay.”

It should have felt rather inert and harmless, Graeme’s blood, compared to all the other blood Lockett had been privy to in his life, including his own, but something about it felt almost corrosive. In the tiny bathroom he washed his hands for five minutes, long after the water started running clean. It took another fifteen to get the blood out of his clothes, mostly with magic, even though using it felt caffeinated and bruised and snappy. There was a smear on his face under his eye and a little in his hair. When it was all off his person he could focus on the fact that it was all under his fingernails, and that his heart was beating really fast. He sat on the cold tile floor and stared into a corner of the wall until reality started to turn inside out. When he went back out into the waiting room it was nearly dawn. He passed out in the chair by the window and had dark dreams. When he woke up again, it was light outside, diffuse grey over the low, flat city, and the nurse was back. “You want to come sit with your friend?”

“Is that okay?”

“They’re running some tests before they can start grafting things back on. He won’t wake up, not yet, but — you know, kindness heals.”

She led him around the back of the emergency room through the sterile hallways to the recovery room where Graeme was in the bed. They had not bothered with magically healing anything, so that the replacement pieces could be more efficiently molded back on. The doctors had done the tricks that Wray had showed Lockett years previous in the supervised transformation cells in Seattle, which he said he in turn had learned from Graeme, spells that would keep wounds clean and stop the bleeding when injuries could not be magically healed. For some reason, not that it mattered, they had loosely bandaged the wounds in strips of soft white cloth so that where visible amidst the blankets Graeme looked like a burn victim. He was very pale and small and in the whole room of no-color his wild hair and the bruisy purple circles under his eyes seemed very dark. Lockett’s heart moved.

The nurse was pulling the chair up from the corner next to the bed. “Can I touch him,” Lockett said, before he could stop himself.

“Yes, just be careful.” The nurse pointed out the IV bags attached to him by means of the taped-over needle in the crook of his elbow. “And you can’t see it, but he has these magical cocoons on him, for the magic shock, and to help him breathe, because of the damage to his lungs… you’ll feel it, when you get close. You can’t disturb it unless you’re trying, so please don't try. But you can hold his good hand.”

“Can they fix — ”

“Yes, I told the doctors what you said. They’re regrowing the fingers. He works with his hands?”

“You could say that.”

“Alright.” The nurse patted the back of the chair. “Sit. You probably have an hour, maybe a little longer. It’s the end of my shift but somebody’ll come back and get you.”

She left, he sat down. After a minute or two he summoned the wherewithal to touch the limp open cup of Graeme’s hand. Inside of it he felt a weak spark falling off. They really didn't touch that much; that was by his own choice, he figured. Graeme’s palm was soft and clammy but there were rough calluses on his thumb and fingertips from fingerpicking his guitar, which Lockett had never known him to do much before Saint Rose. “It makes me feel like Joni Mitchell,” he’d said. To which Lockett had said, what's wrong with feeling like Joni Mitchell. Nothing, but I'm just not — that’s not the vibe, Graeme said, laughing. I'm a Buffy Sainte-Marie kind of guy. Lockett had reminded him that Buffy was a master at playing fingerstyle and Graeme had said, you're missing the point! It was summer, and maybe they were at Volunteer Park, in the beginning of the dusk. Lockett had walked home that night down the hill in the dark, thinking, what would this mean to me if I was a normal person and had had a normal life? He thought about it in his room while he prepped himself a shot and thought about it as Royce came in and delivered a stupid monologue he didn't hear and he thought about it while he was lying in his bed floating out of himself while the turntable spun Spacemen 3’s _Recurring: just the way that you laugh when you're talking to me makes my life worthwhile…_

Because Graeme was asleep, and the nurse had said he wouldn’t wake up yet, and the door was closed, and nobody was listening, and it almost felt like a dream that should have been bad but wasn’t quite bad, and what did that say about him, that it wasn’t that bad? Because of all that, he let himself hold Graeme's hand. His fingers were cool and limp against the inside of Lockett's wrist like damp reeds.

“I missed you,” Lockett told him, trying for gentle platitudes even though his voice cracked. Kindness heals, the nurse had said. “Graeme, I’m glad that — ” He was going to say _glad you're here_. “That you're okay. They said — well, they told me you would be okay. But I guess we’ll see.”

Graeme's hand must have been inside the breathing cocoon the nurse had mentioned, because he could feel it too. It was like a little bellows crank started going in his chest, kind of plodding and methodical, lifting everything up and settling it down again.

“Why did you — why me?” Later he would reflect on how he never would have asked this question if Graeme could have answered him. He would reflect on how he couldn’t really stop once he had started. Like somebody had opened the sluiceway and started letting the entire reservoir out. “I don't understand,” he said, “I’m not like you. I really don’t know what to do. With you. And I really don’t know,” he said, even knowing this was a lie, “what you want from me. And why. You really scare the fuck out of me.”

He laughed, but it was kind of a pathetic scraping sound, and his eyes felt hot. He stared at the grout in the tile floor and watched it slowly blur.

“I think maybe I quit junk because I wanted to know — what it really felt like. Being — ” god damn it — “close to you. But… I don’t know if it’s a good feeling. I don't really think it is. But I don’t want it to stop.”

This was perhaps the bravest thing he had ever said aloud. And yet, he had only said it aloud in the first place because its object was unconscious and couldn’t hear it. That possibly meant it wasn't very brave it all. He remembered Graeme's note from February ‘92: _I'm miles behind you, I’m so sorry_ … It was his turn now, he figured, to be miles behind. Desperately struggling up the endless hill in the swallowing darkness to make the finish line before they stopped the clock.

“I don’t really know what happens now,” he told Graeme's still and silent face. “I wish you would wake up so I could see your eyes.”

In about an hour, when the day nurse came in, Lockett was asleep, with his hand on the bed limply touching Graeme’s limp hand, and at first he didn't know where he was and remembered a flash of being thirteen at the Muggle hospital in McCall after suffering what the doctors called a “vicious animal attack;” his mom was with him, and they were talking about an installment payment plan for the uninsured cost of rabies shots, and then the state got involved and everything kind of snapped…

“You alright?” said the nurse, resting a hand on his shoulder. There was one of those calm spells in it that nurses were always using, maybe without even meaning to; it was like a drop into a sea. “They’re going to start your friend’s surgery. How about you go get a bite to eat?”

Outside it had started raining the kind of fine summer needle-rain that would blow off in fifteen minutes. Cars drifted by in the wet street, throwing a wash of distorted sound. There was a homeless guy camped out under the awning of a closed pizza shop, looking through the college newspaper. “You know where I could get something to eat,” Lockett asked him.

“Up the block at the co-op,” said the guy. “Are you alright, kid?”

“What?”

“There’s blood on you,” the homeless guy observed. Indeed, when Lockett looked later, he had missed a spot near the hem of his t-shirt. “And, worse, you look like you’ve recently come to some kind of dire realization.”

“Ha ha,” said Lockett. He headed onward up the street toward the co-op, rolling his eyes. Since that time in Ketchikan in the mid-eighties he had had an innate distrust of old hippie acid casualties. A dire realization? Obviously! His entire life was a series of dire realizations. This one was really not that bad, compared to everything else! People thought they could infer something from looking at you and then level you with this big secret. Well, they were full of shit. Obviously he knew exactly what he was dealing with. Obviously it was not insurmountable, as nothing else, to date, had been insurmountable. Not that he knew anything about this, really, but it was just —

(A word like a cloud dispersing apart into mirror droplets on a blue day.)

If it had been a real wound, he would have shoved his fingernails into it. Love! It was just love!

He started laughing, jogging across the street against the light, and he kept laughing across the co-op parking lot and into the bakery section at the back of the store, and even at the checkout counter, counting his badly wrinkled Muggle bills, and he laughed as he handed off a croissant to the homeless guy, and he laughed the rest of the way back to the hospital, and when he got there he was obliged to stand out in the rain for ten minutes or so, watching the traffic on the street, the clouds moving quickly overhead, showing a misshapen edge of the sun as a raw, opaque jewel, until he could collect himself enough to go back inside.

\--

There were no dreams at all. There was just a vibrant, soothing darkness occasionally intercut with bright sounds he had never heard before and could never quite replicate when he woke up. They kept him under for two days with magic and morphine while they grew him new flesh and replaced his bones. For the rest of his life he would feel creaky when he walked long distances, and occasionally he would wake up in the middle of the night and have to shake feeling back into the fingers that had been replaced on his left hand.

The first time he woke up, everything seemed to be happening in the past tense. There was a nurse replacing whatever was in the IV bag suspended above the bed. In the manner of dreams it did not surprise him that he was in a hospital and couldn’t really feel anything, felt like he was floating, and that his mom was asleep in a chair at the end of the bed, even though he hadn't seen her in what felt like years. “Hi there,” said the nurse. “Can you hear me?”

He nodded.

“Any pain?”

Shook his head.

“Alright. We got you fixed up.” She rested her beringed hand on his shoulder and even like this he could feel the magic flowing out of her and into him. “You just need to rest.”

The match blew out again, and he drifted. Next thing he knew Lockett was sitting there at the bedside, slouched deeply in an uncomfortable chair, summer freckles strewn across his narrow face, dark eyelashes, cuffed flannel sleeves, jeans torn at the knee, reading the latest issue of _Smoke and Mirrors_. There was a cartoon of the Seattle no-wave quintet Nightshade on the front cover that had clearly been drawn by Cal, and bubbles of bright, animated graffiti-style text: _Scene Report: Nightshade, Obliviator, and A. Robinson at the Den! New Band Alert: Phantom Orchid! Mt. Meany’s debut album reviewed! The Photo Show at Alki Gallery reviewed! New Fiction by Lisa James!_

God, he was really home. He was really home. He watched, trying to remain absolutely still, almost afraid to move, as Lockett licked his finger and turned the page. His precise slouch and the calibration of his furrowed brow as he read. He was like a telephone pole that had been struck by lightning. So many unimaginably terrible things had happened to him in his life, and yet. And yet! He was still very kind. Very good. Very talented. Very beautiful, though perhaps only in Graeme’s mind. Very gentle, very thoughtful, very intelligent, very still. The last survivor of some stately cryptid species moving in the trees at dusk.

The world was so flattened in dimension that he could only feel the good things. That the bed was soft. That there was no pain. That he loved Lockett so much there was a small warm light on in his chest than nothing could turn out — nothing at all. Not even himself. Sometimes the light felt too hot, too bright. Sometimes he tried as hard as he could to pretend it wasn’t there at all, or he drank until he couldn’t feel it. Why had he ever done something so completely stupid? God, it was the best feeling in the world. Every other feeling cowed in the face of it. He just let himself feel how warm it was for a while, so that he almost fell asleep again. Instead the best and worst thing that could possibly have happened happened, which was that Lockett looked up and their eyes met.

Graeme basically stopped breathing. Every single word and sound got up and cleared out of his head except for the most angelic music imaginable. More angelic even than the music that was possibly played in heaven. His mind produced something off side A of _Recurring_ by Spacemen 3, but even this was a flat and two-dimensional comparison to the roaring cacophony of beauty running on six cylinders through his brain like a possessed orchestra and, possibly, probably, seeping out his ears…

“Graeme,” Lockett said.

Right, that was his name. He had to force his voice out to speak. “Hi.”

“They had to grow you some new vocal cords,” Lockett told him, dropping his magazine unceremoniously on the floor. “Take it easy.”

He remembered his left hand. Something squeezed an eyedropper of fear, a single sour note into the symphony… He didn’t want to look at it, so he reached his right hand across himself and touched it and it felt whole.

“We’re in Moscow. Moscow, Idaho, ha ha. Do you remember — ”

He nodded. His hand had all the right fingers, but the ring finger was missing the freckle on the pad, and the pinky didn't have the old scar around the knuckle anymore, from fishing with his father when he was six years old. He moved them and tried to make some bar chord shapes, which hurt.

“They said it’ll be fine,” Lockett said. “Physical therapy. It’ll be fine. Does anything hurt?”

“No.”

“Okay. Do you want me to try and get — ”

Graeme shook his head. “No.”

Lockett stood up and wrapped his hand around the inside of Graeme’s wrist. Every atom in Graeme's body was screaming this terrific squall of feedback. The instrument having been leant up against the amplifier… I want to be totally covered in you looking at me forever, Graeme thought. He felt small enough to be held in the palm of Lockett’s hand.

“I’m really sorry,” he said.

Lockett’s face transformed like some kind of moving sculpture into something resembling a smile. “Why are you sorry?”

“I just thought — I wished I could see you.” His voice sounded completely, absolutely, utterly wrong, and, indeed, wouldn’t ever sound quite the same again, but he could hardly feel anything about it except a vague bemusement. “I didn’t mean for it to, um — ”

“Actually happen?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I’m not really glad that it did, because you almost died, but I’m glad that it did, you know…”

He _had_ almost died, hadn’t he? He had literally felt the first swirling eddies of that old cold current dragging him away. Something about it was kind of hilarious now. “Lockett,” he said.

“Hmm?”

He almost said something that would have been really unwise, but would at least have ripped the bandaid off for later. Instead — well, he supposed he thought he was asking the same thing he should have said. “Can you hear it too?”

“Can I hear what?”

He looked around the little white room, as though there would be a speaker somewhere or something. “The most beautiful music in the world,” he said.

There was this wry little perfect grin in Lockett’s narrow mouth. “Where’s it coming from?”

“From everywhere! Lockett, you can hear it, right?”

“I can't hear it,” Lockett told him. Graeme must have made some heartbroken face because then he said, “I can imagine it.”

“What are you imagining?”

“This Mortal Coil doing ‘Kangaroo.’”

“Lockett!”

“What?”

Graeme closed his eyes. “That isn’t the half of it,” he said. “It's ten times that.”

“I think I would spontaneously combust if I heard anything ten times more beautiful than This Mortal Coil doing ‘Kangaroo.’”

“No, you wouldn’t.” The music was coming out of the color was coming out of the light was coming out of the music… “It’s the music that — my heart — I wish you could hear it…”

He thought he felt Lockett’s thumb drift across the inside of his wrist. “What does it sound like?”

“Nothing else.” He was aware, inasmuch as he was aware of anything, which was not much, that he was slowly sinking into the heart of the light, the core of the noise, where it became silence. “It just is…”

\--

The next time he woke up, Lockett was sitting in the same chair reading an old National Geographic, and Graeme’s parents were there, sitting at the end of the bed, hushedly murmuring to one another with the drawn and dire expressions on their faces that meant they were talking about money. Lockett saw he was awake first. No music this time, but at least there was something a little apologetic about his expression. Graeme looked at him with more than a little desperation and closed his eyes to pretend to be asleep again. But, Lockett, sounding pretty regretful about it at least, said, “Catherine? Alexei?”

“What is it?”

“Gray?” 

“Honey?”

Graeme felt his mom grab his foot and gave in. He was promptly smothered. Even his dad kissed his face. He hadn’t seen his parents in such a long time and hadn't really had a full-time relationship with them since he was twelve, so that sometimes he tended to forget that they could be very sweet when they weren’t making it abundantly obvious that he was the absolute least of their worries.

“Lockett,” Graeme heard his mother say, “would you be a dear and get the doctor…”

As his dad fluffed up the pillows so that he could sit up in bed, Graeme braced himself for whatever was coming. It only took a few minutes for Lockett to come back in tailed by a very serious-looking physician in a white lab coat. “Aha,” he said, “Mr. Sugarbush. There you are.”

“Here I am,” said Graeme regretfully. Lockett met his eyes with an expression of muted sympathy and sank into the corner by the biohazard bin.

“Well,” said the doctor, “cutting to the chase, you have — frankly, the worst case of magic shock I’ve ever seen.” He folded his arms sternly over his chest. There was a smear of blood or something on his striped pastel tie. “Instinctive Apparition alone wouldn’t’ve done it. You don’t have to tell me what kind of magic you did, but it’s a minor miracle you didn't have a heart attack, or a stroke. That certainly didn’t have a positive impact on your ability to Apparate without catastrophically splinching yourself. Nor did the fact that your blood alcohol level was twice the legal recommendation for safe Apparition.”

Graeme ducked his head and studied his hands, feeling like a misbehaving child, or a dog. As though it could be ignored that everybody in the room was staring at him.

“I’m recommending that you don't use any magic at all for at least a month,” the doctor went on, “ideally two. No Apparating — not even side-along. I would even strongly recommend against portkeys, Floo, or broom travel. No fast-forwarding the TV, no heating up your food… You’ll need physical therapy for your hand and probably for your leg. We can recommend a Muggle practitioner, because you shouldn’t try any of the magical processes for PT right now. Got it?”

“I got it.”

“Okay. Family, you got it?”

There was the awkwardest chorus of agreement in the world.

“I’ve asked them to keep you for another few days for monitoring. Try to get up a couple times a day and walk down the hallway to the nurses’ station and back. Anything bothering you?”

“No.”

“We’re going to decrease the morphine so it might start,” the doctor said, scribbling something on the chart at the end of the bed. “Ring for a nurse if it does, the bell’s on your left. Feel better soon.”

The doctor left with a whirl of his white coattails as though he couldn’t wait to get out of the room. Graeme could hardly blame him.

“How are we going to get you home under those conditions,” said Graeme’s dad, in the aloof and professorial tone of voice that meant he was inviting suggestions because he personally had no idea and couldn’t be bothered to think of one.

Lockett got up. “I can Apparate home and get my truck and drive all three of you back to Seattle.”

Graeme’s mom shook her head. “We both have to go back to work tomorrow. But if you would drive him home once he’s discharged that would be much appreciated.”

Every atom in Graeme’s entire being was screaming, _do not leave me_. But he couldn’t very well say this, especially not in front of his parents. It felt like something was trying to pull a piece of him off and stretching it as far as it would go until it broke. Lockett was looking at him like he felt similarly, or otherwise this was such a desperately wishful projection that he almost believed it. But Lockett said, “Of course. I’ll just, um, go now…”

“You can Apparate from — the nurses have this special room, they’ll show you.”

“Right. Thanks.” He looked to Graeme. “I’ll bring you some clothes, alright?”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

They were just speaking to one another now like there were no other people in the room, or the world. “I’ll be back soon,” Lockett said.

“Okay. See you.”

Then he was out the door and a part of Graeme’s soul withered and died.

“What a nice young man,” said Graeme’s father with his customary delighted cluelessness. “Looks like a vampire I knew in Tashkent.”

Graeme’s mom said “Alexei” at the same time that Graeme said, “Dad.”

“What? He was widely respected. Pillar of the community.”

“Lockett’s not a vampire,” Graeme said. _He's actually a werewolf…_

“Well, of course I know that,” said Graeme’s dad, “he was sitting with us in the waiting room in broad daylight earlier. I’m just saying the resemblance — ”

“Alexei…”

Graeme looked toward the ceiling for strength. “We sure are relieved you’re alright, son,” said his father.

“Thank you. I mean, I am too…”

“Gray, honey,” said his mother, “what did you do?”

He really didn't want to do this, not so soon, but he went to the box where he kept it in the back of his mind and carefully ran a key through the tape until it launched its whole terrible self out like a fucked jack-in-the-box. “I broke a curse,” he said.

“Ah,” said his father, perking up, “which one?”

He knew they were only going to be interested in the magical particulars, rather than any of the context. “It, like, rewrote the code of these doors to make them not doors.”

His parents exchanged a look. “Sounds like a variation on _recensere_ ,” said his father. “Very powerful.”

“It was definitely not Latinate,” Graeme told them. “It was… you know, the room…”

“We don’t know the room, honey,” said his mother, firmly but gently, like a schoolteacher. “It’s your room. Only you know the room.”

“Right. Of course.”

“How did you do it?”

“I fixed the problem in the room.” He watched his parents exchange another look — the familiar one accompanying the opening of his report card or the evening after the parent teacher conference or the casual ask to “come see my band.” “Right?”

“You could have used your own corresponding variation on _recensere_ ,” his father explained. “Difficult — you know, spell development on the fly. Very advanced magical theory. The way you did it is, of course, the typical academic way that you would learn on the first day of any cursebreaking course worth its salt, but it takes a lot out of you, as you are, ah, now experiencing.”

“Yeah,” said Graeme. “You’re telling me.”

His father was an expert at doling out praise as an extreme afterthought. “Very well done, anyway, son.”

“Thanks, dad.”

A moment’s awkwardness ensued. Enmeshed in the understanding that it was all real, that it had all just happened, was the big ugly fact he had not quite had the wherewithal to reflect upon yet: Imani, Flora, and Sal were all still in London, dealing with the repercussions in full living color.

“Gray,” his mother said, noticing that he had drifted to some terrifying elsewhere, “we think you can come home.” She was smiling tightly. God, he had inherited that expression from her, hadn't he? “We can look after you for at least a month. It’ll just be — well, there's hardly anything in the house that doesn't use magic, because we had to take everything off the grid. I’ve spoken to the doctor, and it’ll be safe in your room, provided you stay in there, and we can bring you your meals…”

“I think I can jerry-rig the neighbors’ cable,” said his father. “We can try to get you a little television at Goodwill. You know, _I want my MTV!_ ”

Graeme tried an extremely unconvincing fake laugh.

“Now, there is the issue that you don’t have health insurance. And that — I know Lockett meant well, but he did give your real name, so you, and subsequently we, as a family, are on the hook to pay the hospital bill, which will probably be substantial, to say the absolute least — ”

“I have money,” Graeme said.

“From — ” His father looked like he really didn't want to know. “From what.”

“Selling drugs, turning tricks, you know…” Their faces were impassive. “Playing guitar in a major touring rock band.”

“That’s right!”

“Oh, thank god, honey,” said his mom. “We were going to smuggle you out of here under cover of darkness and experiment with making the house Unplottable…”

Thankfully, a nurse ducked her head in a few minutes later to check assorted charts and readings and let Graeme's parents know about the imminent end of visiting hours. She came back again in about fifteen minutes, once his parents had left to go retrofit him an eight-week magicless prison in the house in Madrona, and helped him get up, careful not to tug on the IV or look up his hospital gown. Together, they walked, extraordinarily slowly, down the hall to the nurse’s station and back. The windows were high, clouded glass, but it was dark outside, and the hallways were quiet. Beleaguered family in line to murmur haltingly into a payphone, nurses pushing empty gurneys, janitors pushing cleaning carts, a zipped-up corpse wheeled past them by a few orderlies so that Graeme turned to watch it and almost fell on his ass… When they got back to his room he was out of breath and the nurse was basically carrying him. “Great job,” she said, for some reason. “Want something to eat?”

“Please.”

He was provided with a tray of colorless, featureless, textureless, almost flavorless items, but he ate them, then he stumbled into the tiny en-suite toilet to throw up. The nurse came in again about half an hour later. “Did you manage to keep that down?”

“No… sorry.”

She wrote something on the chart. “Not your fault. Want something to help you sleep?”

Did he ever.

\--

When Graeme woke up again, he was alone, and the room seemed smaller than it had been before, as though the ceiling was growing lower liquidly, reaching toward the bed.

He sat up and studied the room. Bed, door, machines, cabinets. IV running clear stuff into his right arm. On his finger was a soft clip which was calculating his pulse, and he took it off, setting one of the machines ringing until he unthinkingly silenced it with magic, which instantly felt like being punched in the chest. His hands felt like clubs. His entire body basically felt hammered together by a bad assemblage sculptor. He swung his legs off the bed and let his feet touch the floor. The tiles were cold. He leaned forward to press the heels of his hands into his eyes, needle tugging at the vein inside his arm, and felt his vertebrae shove out of the back opening in the hospital gown. It felt good for a second until he opened his eyes again and the room was still smaller.

How the fuck was this happening again? Here? Was it going to follow him around for the rest of his life?

He got up, carefully maneuvering the IV ribbons that were still attached to him around all the machinery on the bed. His knees wobbled. It took him an embarrassingly long time to walk over to the wall, bracing himself against the rolling IV stand, and put his palm against the cool plaster. Just the process of filtering through the magic in the wall, the magical theory stuff you learned how to do at age thirteen at Denny, basic interpretation he normally could do half-asleep or drunk, instantly started his head throbbing. He felt disinfecting and self-cleaning spells, an old and much-degraded charm for calmness and a stronger one for healing. Nothing out of the ordinary for a hospital.

His vision turned black when he pulled away, as though he had stood up too quickly, and he braced his free hand against the counter behind him. He knew he would have recognized the magic if it was some carry-over from what had happened in London. That spell had shaken the earth. It was like an anvil dropped on your head. It would have been impossible to miss.

The other possibility, which he had been endeavoring not to think about, was that it was not magic at all. They were titrating down the morphine. It would make sense that it would start to happen now.

He thought he would rather face that spell again, even like this. Anything other than this old friend. Its hideous gnarled fist around his gut set to slowly opening and closing. It had been a long time since it had gotten so desperate that it had had to sit him down and show him what the alternative was. Listen, he thought, is this really necessary? I would want a drink even if you didn't do this to me. 

Of course it didn't matter. The room trembled a little, like a bouncy castle at a kid’s birthday party, and closed tighter by another torturous increment. 

This simply could not be withstood any longer. Bracing himself against the IV stand he set about looking through all the cabinets and all the drawers in the tiny room, starting with the ones closest to the floor. There were boxes of bandages, gauze, pipettes, vials, cotton swabs, fresh rolls of sterile crunchy paper for the exam tables. He crouched and reached in and pulled everything out onto the floor to get at the array of glass and plastic bottles in the back, but they were all either cleaning solutions or magical compounds — dittany, blue cohosh — that he knew were at worst harmful or at best ineffective if digested. Then the drawers. His knees cracked when he stood, and the way the new kneecap seemed to slide over the joint felt wrong, like there was a sharp piece still attached on the inside. There was nothing in the drawers either — a handful of capped syringes, tongue depressors, a stack of hospital gowns, little packets of petroleum jelly embarrassingly reminiscent of the free lube they gave out at the clinics in London. 

Logically he knew there would be nothing in that room. They'd seen his blood alcohol when he came in, and then they'd mentioned it in front of Lockett and his parents. They probably had it written in big letters all over his chart. But logic was long since out the window, not that there were any windows. And he knew he couldn't make it to the nearest liquor store. It wouldn't've been open, if he had. So it was this or face whatever circus of horrors his own unruly brain had in store for him this time, now that it had a lot more ammunition. 

The higher cabinets presented somewhat of a challenge. After clearing off the lower two shelves to no avail, he pushed himself up onto the counter to get at the highest shelves and in doing so separated the IV needle bodily from the inside of his arm. He was intent enough in the search not to notice this until he nearly slipped in his own blood and cracked his head open, whereupon his attention was called to the gushing wound in the crook of his elbow. Nothing to do about it really except fold forearm toward shoulder and continue the quest. If he found the thing he needed everything would be better and it wouldn't matter anymore. If the room had gotten any smaller he didn't notice it. Now that it knew how desperate he was it would be kind to him. Right?

There was one cloudy plastic bottle in the back left corner of the highest shelf that looked like it had been sitting there for decades. He grabbed it and struggled down from the counter. By this point the floor was fairly carpeted with bandages and gauze and tongue depressors and blue paper hospital gowns and spattered artistically with blood, which was dripping around his elbow. Just about none of this information filtered the way it was supposed to through his consciousness and into his brain, because he was drowning helplessly in the thing that the label on the bottle said, which was _Food and Lab Grade 200 Proof Ethanol_. 

Deep inside him the great red-and-black pit began to sing. It could sing very beautifully when it wanted to. It was more beautiful than the voice of Alex Chilton or Kate Bush or any of the angels in heaven. It was almost more beautiful than — what stupid thing had he been hearing before? The music from his heart that was for Lockett? He stumbled back to the bed and sat down heavily, cradling the bottle in his hands. Like a talisman — like a first snowflake. Like a vial of blood. A flower, a feather, a stone. 

This wasn't the type of lab alcohol which could kill you. Well, it could kill you, but not by poisoning. Well, not right away by poisoning. It had no taste or smell at all. It just was. It was like water. It was total hypnotic perfection. It was going to take everything away and restore reality to a semi-negotiable state of meditative stasis where nothing jumped or flared. It was going to send all the psychic wreckage packing for a long weekend. It was going to clean him out and make him himself again if it killed him. It was going to erase what happened and make everything okay again. 

Wasn't it? 

It had before —

Had it? 

_What am I doing?_

It felt like coming around from a dream he had been dreaming over and over for a very long time. Around him, the world was real. The hospital was real. The mess on the floor was real. The sound of a droplet of his blood landing on a square of bare tile, like a raindrop, was real. 

He dared to say it aloud. “What am I doing?”

 _Taking your medicine so you can get better_ , sang the red-and-black pit. 

He could not yet necessarily articulate, I am too good for this — he wasn't sure that he even believed that. What he did understand now was that _better_ was and had always been a fleeting illusion. Like a sundog, or a rainbow. What kind of medicine made you sicker? After long enough, buying into that lie over and over got into “fool me twice” territory: Shame on me. He also understood this could either be another link in the cycle of shame and denial about alcoholism that kept you in the suffocating thrall, or it could be broken, once and for all. He put the bottle down on the counter, got up shakily, and negotiated the two steps across the wreckage toward the door. 

Out in the hallway there were eldritch beings passing silently like spirits in a Studio Ghibli movie, and the walls seemed to shiver and glow like a sick person. Now that he no longer had the support of the IV stand he was obliged to trail his hand along the wall, which was fine except for a few times when he thought he felt himself dissolving into certain gateways in it, starting at the fingertips… If there were any people in the hallway (he couldn't quite tell) they ignored him, even though he was in his bloody hospital gown with his bare ass hanging out. After approximately an age of the earth he made it to the payphone halfway down the hall to the nurse's station.

There was a ratty old Idaho phone book on top of the booth. The worst thing was that taking it down — it couldn't've weighed five pounds — made his arms shake. He balanced it across the best-working arm and went flipping through the yellow pages. It took him a while because his vision was spinning, but eventually he found R for REHABILITATION and eventually the subheading DRUG AND ALCOHOL REHABILITATION. 

He could feel that thing singing to him still. It was too easy to think about it as something separate from him. The better that he got to know it, the more he knew it was innately of himself. It wasn't even some kind of unnatural growth, like a tumor. It was basically its own little organ, like the gallbladder or something, except that it had wrapped these sickly yellow tendrils around everything else, and when he started to try and pull it out it squeezed tighter and tighter until he gave it what it wanted. When it was feeling pretty sure of itself, like now, because it knew he was a coward, it had this seductive way of communicating, like one of the sirens out of ancient Greek poetry. Gray, it cooed, you're in terrible pain and you've recently been through a life-defining trauma that surmounted even your previous life-defining trauma… don't you think maybe you want to put this off 'til later? 

He started calling anyway. There was one rehab facility in Coeur D'Alene, but nobody answered when he called, so he called two in Boise. The second said they had space. 

"Who is this for," said the woman on the phone. 

"Um, me. I just need somewhere I can't leave while it all… happens, you know. And someone to make sure I don't die." 

"Your name?" 

"Graeme Sugarbush. Graeme with a G-R-A-E— ”

"Date of birth?" 

"January eighth, 1970." He felt dizzy all of a sudden. “Want to know the time and coordinates?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Your insurance?" 

"Um — I can pay, you know, out of pocket or whatever." 

There was a muted conversation on the other end of the line. They were probably trying to figure out if they were somehow being scammed. Graeme put his forehead against the wall. "We'll need two thousand up front," said the woman on the phone eventually. 

God, that was a lot of money. "That's fine. I'll be there this afternoon." 

He hung up. There were pins and needles in the two new fingers and his knees felt like they were made of silly putty and broken glass, but he knew there was another call he really ought to make. He dialed the number, and the phone rang. It rang and rang and rang. Of course it did; why would they answer it, if they were even there? He tried to focus all his bruised and battered magic through it toward the other side of the world. It's me, it's only me. Just about instantly something took a pickaxe to his skull and he had to sit down on the cold tile floor. But it must have worked, because somebody picked up the phone. "Hello?" It was Sal. 

It wasn't quite relief that washed through him at the sound of Sal's voice but he remembered through the fog in the van on the way to that unknown place in London Sal's arm around him and the handkerchief full of blood he kept thoughtfully vanishing so that it wouldn't look so bad. "Sal," he said.

"Graeme?" 

"It's me. Hi." 

"Jesus, I could kiss you or I could slap you across the face. We've all been worried sick." 

Sal would’ve known he was alive, Graeme realized, through whatever unfathomable internal mechanism made such things clear to him. But he wouldn’t’ve known where, or how. "Are you all okay?" he asked.

"Whole, surviving… they still can't tell us anything, you know? They have a van outside and they follow us when we go out for anything but they won't move us somewhere safer and I feel like a sitting duck — I feel like I'm losing my mind." He tried a very forced-sounding little laugh, but then he said, with extreme seriousness, "Don't tell me exactly where you are. Just in case somebody's listening." 

This was the first sign of Sal's paranoia, which would consume him for at least another six years. "I'm in the hospital," Graeme said. "Back in the states. Not — where I'm from. Not far, but, not there." 

“Wait, back in the states?" 

"They said instinctive Apparition." 

"Is that even possible?" 

"I guess theoretically." Explaining it he was struck by its deep black humor. "I almost died, they said, from blood loss, from splinching, you know, like, everything. And also I can't use magic for two months because of breaking that curse. That's why, you remember, my nose and everything, they said it was like running an ultramarathon… And — Sal, this the kicker — I'm seeing things now, because of alcohol withdrawal." 

Sal digested this for a moment during which Graeme could picture him standing at the phone by the door of Imani and Flora's townhouse, peering through the lace curtains. "Withdrawal," he said at last.

"Yeah. When it rains, it pours, you know. I guess I should maybe have said something about it being… that bad." 

"Graeme, all of us know and we didn't say anything because — because. There's no excuse." 

"Well I called to tell you all I'm alive and I'm going to go quit. For real, this time. Are Imani and Flora there?" 

"They had to go in for this special interrogation." 

"Special interrogation?" 

"They sedate you, remove all your memories of the incident, and put them in a Pensieve so they can filter through them in minute detail." 

"What? Why would they do that? They can do that?" 

He already knew why Imani and Flora had gone through with it. If they felt responsible for something, they would have done anything to fix it, and the MLE had probably done their best to make them feel like it was all their fault somehow. Maybe they were under pressure. But, even if it was for ostensible purposes of catching a criminal individual or organization, giving the complete contents of your mind to law enforcement in a historical moment when blood purists had infiltrated all levels of magical governance seemed like a recipe for disaster. 

"They can do anything." Sal paused. "They want to do it to you. That's why it's imperative that nobody knows where you are." 

"What about you?" 

"I have an appointment next week, but…" 

He didn't go on. Indeed, Graeme wouldn't hear from him again for another year, and the next time he did was via a letter Sal sent with a crow, a little passe by American wizarding standards, letting Graeme know he was in the "rural Mediterranean," and he was seeking advice because the magic he'd done to conceal and protect the place he'd been living had become sentient and was causing problems. 

"Sal," said Graeme, "tell Imani and Flora I love them and I'm okay, will you?" 

"Of course I will." 

"And you — " He only remembered much later that Sal had told him this when they'd first gone out to the pub together — "keep your head about you, okay?" 

Sal laughed. This time it didn't sound so forced. "And you," he said. "Graeme?" 

“Yeah?"

"Good luck." 

"Thanks, I'm gonna need it. Bye, Sal." 

"Goodbye, Graeme.”

That was the last they spoke for two years. When Graeme struggled up from the floor and put the phone back in the receiver he had to lean against the wall for a minute, and when he opened his eyes again some indescribable entity went slouching past his vision toward the nurses' station. Beyond it was a dark shape sprinting toward him down the hallway, so that he flinched and mentally went through some of the stages of the fight-or-flight reaction, but it was only Lockett. His eyes were huge in his face. “Are you okay? What the fuck happened in there?”

“What?”

“There’s — it looks like the shower scene from _Psycho_ in your room.”

He remembered that the inside of his elbow hurt, and indeed when he unfolded his arm it started fairly gushing blood again. “It’s a long story,” he said, pressing the palm of his hand over the wound. He tried to take a step and faltered and he didn’t even have to blink before Lockett had steadied him with a hand inside his unhurt arm. “Do you think you could do just one more favor for me?” Graeme asked.

“What is it?”

“There’s this rehab place in Boise,” Graeme said. “And they have — well, I just called and they said they would have room for me. And I can’t get there any way but driving. So would you drive me.”

“Rehab place,” Lockett repeated. There was a tone of nervous disbelief beneath his voice that might have offended Graeme if he didn't deserve it. 

“What else am I going to do for two months.” He tried a laugh but it sounded too bitter. “Live with my parents?”

“Graeme, are you sure?”

“No, but. You know, if not now.”

Lockett looked at him with this illegible face and then he looked away. He nodded kind of tightly. “Of course I’ll drive you,” he said. “Are we going now?”

They went back to Graeme’s room. The quantity of blood all over everything was indeed rather shocking now that he was looking at it.

“I brought you some clothes,” Lockett said, handing Graeme a duffle bag. “I think they burned your old ones.”

“Thanks.”

“They’re going to be highwaters on — okay.”

His brain was working at basically the wrong speed. It would be unclear for a long time yet what the right one was. Later he would be incredibly embarrassed that he had basically torn the hospital gown off himself and thrown it on the floor and stood there naked while he dug through the duffle. There was a pair of grey sweatpants emblazoned with a big varsity letter R for Riggins on the thigh; they looked like they were from the seventies both in their raggedness and aesthetic, and he later learned they were, they had belonged to Lockett’s mother. He only got a little blood on Lockett’s white Splanchomany t-shirt, putting it on. When he turned back around Lockett had gotten a big bandage off the floor, which he gently plastered over the wound in the inside of Graeme’s elbow. “How do you want to do this,” he said.

“I just want to walk out the door.”

“I think you might have to make some excuse.”

“What about _obscuro_ , do you think you could do it?”

“On us? While we’re walking?”

He knew it was an unfair ask considering that he himself struggled to do it with a wand on a good day.

“I guess I’ll talk to them.”

“Are you — I mean, can you walk okay?”

“No. It’s fine — just — ” He met Lockett’s eyes and tried to subconsciously communicate the multivalent meaning present in these words. “Stay next to me?”

“Of course.”

Lockett was obliged to prop Graeme up like some kind of human buttress while they made their very slow way down the hall and negotiated with the administrators at the office in the front. First they told Graeme he couldn’t check himself out already because the doctor had ordered another couple days of monitoring, but then he told them in no uncertain terms that he couldn't afford to stay any longer, and they changed their tune pretty quick. They were very nice, but they did make it abundantly clear that Graeme owed them thousands of dollars for assorted “regrowth and grafting procedures” and several pints of blood.

“I have the money,” he told them. He realized later that he probably sound and looked completely delusional. “It’s in my account at the wizarding bank in London.”

“London…”

“London as in England.”

“You mean Gringotts?”

“… Sure.”

Someone called the San Francisco branch and there was a ten-minute conversation during which Graeme fell asleep in one of the waiting room chairs. Lockett had to help him get up so that he could go through all the requisite magical practices for identity confirmation over the phone. When the money order finally went through, he signed a bunch of paperwork without reading it, shoved the carbon copies in the pocket of the sweatpants, and then they went outside into the cool gray day. The clouds were moving quickly overhead and the air smelled like slate and pine and rain… he took a deep breath and nearly overbalanced. “Are you sure about this,” said Lockett.

“Stop asking me if I’m sure,” Graeme told him. “It’ll make me not so sure.”

“Fair enough.”

They piled into Lockett’s mom’s rusty old pickup truck. He’d had the tape player on as loud as it would go on the drive up and it played Joni Mitchell’s _Song to a Seagull_. Lockett reached to turn it down. Graeme turned it back up. _I can’t go back there anymore… you know my keys won't fit the door..._

He only became aware that he was staring at the side of Lockett's face adoringly when he watched it sour.

They backed out of the hospital parking lot and headed south on route 95 toward the Nez Perce reservation. The Idahoan stretch of the Palouse sprawled out in rolling golden waveforms toward the horizon. Above, the gray color gradient of the clouds shifted through strains of purples and blues. Weaving in switchbacks down the long hill out of the high flat country into Lewiston, along the Snake River shrouded in the midmorning haze, south again through quiet towns and villages nestled in farmland and featureless hills. A deer ran across the road. A handful of raindrops kissed the windshield. The Joni Mitchell cassette came to an end, and Graeme looked for another one, but Lockett said, “That’s the only one I have.”

“You only have _one_ cassette tape?”

“It's the only one I keep in the car!”

Graeme found a radio station that was playing Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” “This was my first favorite guitar solo,” Lockett said. There was that cold faraway note in his voice the way there was whenever he spoke about the past. Occasionally now on the long horizon the shadowy ghost of the snow-capped Clearwater Mountains could be seen. The road seemed to crest the high ridge of the world, so that around each corner there was another great and terrible jagged tumbling of land toward sky…

Finally, the road sunk deeply into the Salmon River canyon, and Graeme could only find static on the radio. Out of nowhere, to break the silence, which had started to feel clammy and itchy as damp wool, Lockett asked, “Is your dad Russian or something?”

“Kind of,” Graeme explained. “He’s from one of those towns in Alaska where they still speak Russian and everything. And then he studied magic in Yakutsk, in Siberia. He met my mom in Juneau when she tried to sell the company.”

His dad would tell this story whenever he had so much as one sip of vodka, which was his only vice. He had talked Graeme’s mother out of selling and talked himself into a job. As a teenager, when his mother’s depression was at its worst, Graeme wondered sometimes if she resented his father for this.

“They named me after the famous cursebreaker, Graham Lewis,” Graeme went on for some reason. “So this is probably, technically the most impressive thing I’ve ever done in their eyes, but it still wasn’t good enough, for myriad reasons.”

“Wait, is that what happened? You broke a curse?”

“Oh — sorry. Yeah. That’s what happened.”

“What kind of curse was it?”

He told Lockett the whole story from the beginning, haltingly, because some of the memories were patchy and because when he started talking a lot he had to take a break every few minutes to catch his breath. He even told Lockett about the person with the tangled hair. At the time it just felt like part of the story, but he never told anybody else about it. Then waking up on the sidewalk, the van, the ceaseless nosebleed, the dark, windowless underground rooms where the U.K. wizarding establishment disappeared all its unsavories… Then the wish. (He did not tell Lockett how sincerely he had believed it was his dying wish.) Then the snap across the world. Then bleeding to death in Lockett's front yard.

By the time he finished he was out of breath and Lockett was fairly throttling the steering wheel, probably without realizing he was doing it. “Somebody tried to kill you all,” he summarized finally. It had been obvious the whole time, Graeme supposed, but it was something else to hear it aloud in Lockett’s voice. Like it was finally real. It was real, wasn't it? “Fifteen hundred people. Including you. By crushing you to death.”

“It probably wasn't just one person,” Graeme said. “There are all these, I dunno, extremist groups over there… you know, traditionalist, blood purist, racist fucking lunatics. And they’ll never arrest anybody, because the police — ”

“The police what?”

Graeme met Lockett's eyes and just shook his head. There wasn’t enough air left inside his lungs to speak.

“Okay,” Lockett said. Somehow he just knew. How did he know? He leaned across Graeme to open the passenger side window just a crack. There was a birthmark on the back of his neck just at the edge of his hairline and so much as noticing it made Graeme feel faint. “Just take deep breaths.”

He did as he was told. God, it was so beautiful. The river and the trees. The strange forms of the hills like sleepers under heavy blankets, and the low clouds shifting, knitting together and pulling apart. The air was cool and bright. Eventually he put the window all the way down and put his entire head out of it like a dog.

They went through Riggins, Lockett’s hometown, not much more than a strip of fly fishing outfitters and motels advertising refrigeration services disappearing behind them in the blink of an eye, and not long after that the road climbed out of the canyon into a high flatland ringed with distant hills. The pines against the gray. The soft dark shapes of cattle grazing in the yellow grass. In the not-much-town of New Meadows they turned onto Route 55 to climb into the mountains. Then, in McCall, at the edge of Payette Lake, they stopped for gas, and once the tank was full Lockett had to walk Graeme to the viscerally hideous bathroom to pee. They drove south again into a place fittingly called the Long Valley where against the western hills in the great flat was nested a long, dark reservoir called Lake Cascade.

“What happens now,” Lockett asked him as the road sunk again into a deep pine woods, falling off the high mountain plateau toward the lowlands and the cities in the Snake River plain.

“What do you mean?”

Lockett turned toward the horizon and the distant mountains in their blue-grey shadow like thunderclouds. The radio flickered shades of Soundgarden against some fragmented sermonizing. “I don’t really know,” Lockett said.

“Neither do I.”

Something had to give. It was unclear what, or where. Or when. But something had to give. Yet to be seen was only how long wizarding society would do nothing about it until they absolutely couldn’t anymore.

“D’you think it’ll come here,” Lockett asked.

“What, the…” It was hard to know what to say. The conflict? The ghost of another war? Most wizarding Americans didn’t even know there had been a first one. The roiling sentiments of blood purism and racism were so endemic in American wizarding politics that it was likely nobody had noticed anything different when the conflict in the U.K. was at its height in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. “You mean the… the violence?”

“I guess.”

It already is here, Graeme thought. It's already everywhere. “You know when there’s a forest fire,” he said instead, “and it moves… like, inside the ground? In the loam and the dead stuff…”

Lockett gave him a moderately concerned look. But he said, “Sure.”

“Sooner or later it hits something, right? Something big, and then it really catches, you know?”

“Graeme, where are you going with this?”

“I mean I don't think it ever goes away. Here or there or anywhere. It’s always moving in the grass. And we can’t always see it but — it’s there, you know?” He paused to corral his breath back under him. “That was just… one particular little conflagration and now there’ll be a little while and then another…”

“I think you’re underselling that it almost killed you.”

Graeme’s brain played the riff that opened “Alive” by Pearl Jam. “Well,” he said, “it didn't, because…”

 _Because of that thing we both know but can’t say_ …

The road met the river again and sunk beside it, winding into the pines, and the spikes and flares of music and voices on the radio faded once more into white noise.

“Why did you come here,” Lockett asked, like he didn’t really want to ask but had to know. “Why Idaho, why my house?”

“I told you — I just thought — I didn't think it would really happen.”

“You thought… you just wished you were… with me?”

“Basically.”

Lockett scraped his lower lip through his teeth. “Why me?” he asked.

A cold dread had been circling Graeme's spine for hours and it was closing in now on the kill. “You’re my friend,” he said.

“Why not Alex? Why not… Cal?”

“Well, I didn't talk to Alex or Cal every other day when I was over there, the way I talked to you… I don’t know, Lockett, I was really scared and I thought I was dying and I just thought — ”

“Of me.”

“Of you.”

“Graeme…”

The silence was excruciating. More excruciating still was the understanding that he had to end this now or it would be this bad forever.

“Can you pull over?”

“Are you gonna be sick?”

“No — ” at least not physically… “but… it’ll be easier.”

There was a wide gravel shoulder where people pulled off to park and go fly fishing or hike into the hills. Lockett pulled the pickup to the verge of the trees. The pullout was so washboarded from the rain and snowmelt that Graeme nearly was sick after all. He listened into the static on the radio. _Just pull off the fucking bandaid._

“You remember what I was saying about that music?” he asked.

Lockett’s face was a little wary. “You mean your staggeringly beautiful morphine hallucination?”

“Yeah, that.”

“What about it?”

 _My heart makes that sound about you._ Instead of saying it he wrenched open the door of the truck and dry heaved in the dust. He was no stranger to throwing up at inopportune moments but it was worst when it was just acid. There was something painfully symbolic about that. There’s almost nothing left, and what there is won't stay there.

He sat up and shut the door. Lockett passed him a Nalgene bottle of cold water. “Is that,” he tried. “You know, is it starting.”

“It started maybe four hours ago.” He had a sip of water and then he had to stop before he puked again. “And I’m seeing funny things again.”

“Well, you’re, uh, being very brave…”

“No. I’m being very stupid.” He put his head back against the itchy headrest. “I think,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that. Why are you sorry?”

Just for everything, he thought. Just for myself. Just for how much this is. Just because it is literally burning me down inside. Just because I can’t help it all exploding catastrophically sideways out of me like Mount Saint Helens. But he said, “I don’t know.”

Lockett was worrying his lower lip between his teeth. He reached for the radio and turned down the static, but then he turned it up again. “Are you alright?”

“I feel like death.”

“We can go back — ”

“No, we can’t.”

It had to be now, or it would never happen. That much he knew.

Lockett hovered his hand over the gearshift. “Well what is it?”

“Lockett, I have to tell you something.”

Lockett turned toward the windshield and the ragged hills at the southern horizon. He was so slight that the deep steadying breath he took seemed to move his entire body. “Sure,” he said. In fact, he sounded remarkably unsure. 

“I need to tell you — ” But he couldn’t go on any further. His eyes were hot. His entire face was hot. Beyond the truck the forest and the river were swimming together into a single vivid gray-green. Suddenly he remembered the strike of conviction and he wondered how he could ever have forgotten. The bolt of raw, pure truth. It was real enough to have become fact in an instant. He had commanded every drop of power at the heart of himself, take me to the person that I love. And it had, against every last odd, against every heretofore established stricture governing how magic was supposed to work. It was magic beyond magic. It was that simple.

Their eyes met across the center console of the truck. There was an electric stillness. He thought he read in Lockett’s face that he already knew what he was going to say. How could he not? It was extraordinarily obvious. It was the most extraordinarily obvious thing that had ever been. It was like the sky was blue and the forest was every shade of green known to the human eye and some shades of green that had not yet been documented. It was a pure fact of reality. It was a basic condition governing existence on this mortal plane. It was burning him down inside, and he could not wait a moment longer. He had no choice but to leave it up to the gravitational pull of the incredible atomic object which was suspended between them at all times. It pulled him closer, and he closed his eyes.

[ THE SWEETEST KISS EVER. A SWEETNESS THAT CANNOT BE DESCRIBED BUT CAN ONLY BE KNOWN. ]

FOLLOWED BY:

A CONVERSATION PRESENTED MOSTLY ONLY IN DIALOGUE

[ Each of them pulling away from one another into a cold stillness. A logging truck speeds past, close, shaking the pickup. ]

“Sorry. Sorry — I’m sorry.”

[ Beat. Lockett touches his mouth and looks at his fingers and does it a few more times until he believes he is not bleeding. He is making quick mental calculations. Somebody with more emotional intelligence than Graeme might see that the expression on his face is not far from fear. ]

“What are you doing?”

[ Not how he expected this would go. ] “I, well.” [ Being pulled out of him hand over hand. ] “I have feelings for you, Lockett, I mean, I love — ”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’ve never been this serious about anything.”

“Graeme — you — ”

“I’m telling you that I know what’s in my heart.”

[ Beat. Lockett studies his hands. Then the mountains beyond the windshield. Considering other possible reasons beyond the obvious. Finding some: ]

“Graeme, you have, they said, _catastrophic_ blood loss. On top of alcohol withdrawal, again.”

[ Beat. If there were flowers in this car they would have died. ]

“You don’t believe me.”

“How could I believe you?”

“How could you _not_ believe me!”

“You have to understand, I know you. I know it’s total shit. It has nothing to do with me. It’s just limerence. You think you’re in love with anybody who shows you the slightest kindness. Anybody who gives you a purpose in your life. So that you can go ahead scraping yourself over other people, and you never have to ask yourself why.”

[ Beat. ]

“Who told you that.”

“Nobody. It’s obvious.”

“You think I scrape myself over you?”

“You use other people to hurt yourself. You’re literally doing it right fucking now!”

[ Graeme turns toward the windshield because he’s so embarrassed to be crying. ]

“I’m sorry.”

[ The sound of his voice rips the largest intact piece of Lockett’s heart in half but he is very practiced at not showing it by now. ]

“Graeme, if you keep saying that, without changing the things you do that you say you’re sorry for… I dunno. It’s getting awfully hard to believe you.”

[ Lockett starts the truck again and merges out onto the highway. Punching the gearshift vengefully. His lips are white from being bitten so tightly inside his mouth to keep from saying what he wants to say, even though he doesn’t really know what he wants to say. Beside him Graeme wraps his arms around himself. He looks and feels like he’s been punched in the face. ]

“We never have to — ” [ Knowing they both know this already, just saying it to clear their last exchange from the air. ] “I’ll never say anything — ”

“Sure.”

“Lockett — ”

“Just — ” [ Deep, steadying breath he really hopes will work. Hates that it sounds so shaky. ] “Please stop talking.”

[ Graeme has never before been the subject of Lockett speaking with force and with anger. To be fair, Lockett rarely does. It shocks him. (Not as much as it shocks Lockett.) Circling like sharks around Graeme’s bruised little mind: _You use other people to hurt yourself._ Worst of all is the dawning knowledge that this part at least is true. ]

[ The drive to Boise is another forty minutes of wounded silence. As they get closer the radio fades back in out of static into something obvious and excruciating like “Fuzzy” by Grant Lee Buffalo. ]

[ Just after noon, Lockett pulls up in front of the detox facility, and Graeme gets out before the car has even fully stopped. Inside, while he checks in, he watches in the mirror above the front desk as Lockett’s truck pulls back out onto the street and disappears into traffic. ]

[ Lockett makes it back up Route 55 just past the horseshoe bend on the Payette River before he has to pull the truck over and walk into the woods. ]

\---

\--

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [roll credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyOlox5OagI)


	9. 9.

**9.**

\--

The three dead kids were named Laurie, Charlie, and Ian. Flora had saved the issue of the _Prophet_ that had their pictures on the front page, even though she could hardly stand to look at it. Portraits of the three of them — Laurie’s from a Muggle studio shop, Charlie's from his Quidditch league, Ian’s clearly from some stoned misadventure on the Hogwarts grounds — had also been set out in front of the shrunken wreck of Dyatlov & Roswell, on top of a pile of damp, decaying flowers, leant up against the building in defiance of the police tape and barricades. There was never anybody on Knockturn Alley this early in the morning, especially not these days. The place had skated by with little to no MLE intervention even in blatantly illegal circumstances for centuries, and now that there was an actual investigation happening on the block many of the shop owners had cleared all the evil stuff out of the front windows and gone underground for a little while.

Flora stepped over the police line and crouched in front of the little memorial, knees cracking. The press hadn’t printed any official causes of death, but she had found it all out from Evvy and Croydon, who were long gone from London now after all the various death threats, in so going dissolving the record label Hellfire Club and defaulting on their ownership of the storied club. According to the coroner, Charlie had been crushed in the initial stampede for the locked doors. Laurie had had some kind of undiagnosed magic sensitivity disorder and the mere exposure a curse so powerful had killed her. Ian had been kicked in the head in the rush out onto the street. He had hung on for a couple days in hospital and then slipped away. In their pictures they seemed incredibly alive. Bright, laughing faces. Flora hadn’t thought to bring any flowers, but she left them her pack of cigarettes. She didn't really smoke, after all, except for the last two weeks.

On the fateful night, around the same time Imani and Flora were being scooped into a van on the Regent Street, a legion of MLE spellcasters had frozen the shrinking curse on D&R midway to crushing all the open space out of the building. The freezing spell was frequently deployed by MLE forces when curses couldn’t be broken, and it was notoriously unstable; they were obliged to send a task force every couple of days to renew it. The wreckage of the building itself was also unstable, as a veritable spiderweb of caution tape stretched across the tortured maw made abundantly clear. And yet — and yet. Here Flora was. It was just after dawn, it had been two weeks and nobody could tell them anything about who or how or why, and there was nothing else to do but go inside.

After the van, there had been the room. Imani had just sat there with her arms tightly folded across her chest, staring into space. Flora had tried to respond to every question with a question. Where’s Sal? Where’s Graeme? Where are Moira and Kelton and Meabh? Eventually tea was brought in and before Flora could take a sip Imani reached across the table and swept everything onto the floor. She said the only words she had said all night: “Why are you wasting your time?”

Inside the contorted structure, the great room that had until recently been a fifteen-hundred capacity concert hall felt like a kind of warped funhouse hallway, creaking and groaning, ceiling dripping the rust-colored remnants of summer rain and burst pipes into mirrored puddles on the pitted floor. Flora summoned a little light into her hand and lifted it to float at her shoulder. The stillness and the quietude were uncanny and chilling. Far above her head, the ceiling had heaved in two in a kind of tectonic subversion, sending one plate scraping below the other, showing a few swaths of blue-grey morning sky. But not even the birds would dare to come inside.

After the room, they had been driven home in the still, shell-shocked midmorning, watching commuters and schoolkids bustling on the street, laughing, as though nothing had happened. For them, Flora reminded herself, nothing had. Sal was at the house on Belgrade Road, pacing in the kitchen. Moira and the rest of the Sluagh, he told them, were long gone, home to Dublin. And Graeme had Apparated someplace unknown out of an Apparition-proof room. And there was no way of knowing where he was. Only that he was alive, Sal said, but not by much. Another van arrived about thirty minutes later and stationed itself across the street, two doors down. Watching, waiting. In the early evening Evvy called from a Muggle phone booth in an undisclosed location to share that she and Croydon were alive but they were going to ground, possibly indefinitely, thus dissolving Hellfire Club and any and all record contracts thereunder. “Good luck,” Evvy said. “Stay alive.” Imani went to bed. Flora and Sal sat in the living room, staring at the wizarding news on the muted TV — playing again and again the same shaky video of panicked people rushing into the street as the building swooned and shuddered…

Flora picked her way across the floor, careful around the heaving, splitting floorboards shoving vampire stakes of splintered wood toward the ceiling, and found the stairs to the balcony off stage right. The width of the stairs had shrunken to be just about half again as wide as her hips, so she was obliged to walk up sideways, one foot at a time, bracing herself against the wall. The stucco seemed to shudder and breathe, straining desperately against the bonds of the freezing spell. From the balcony, the door into the upstairs offices was unlocked, because everybody who had been back there had run out as soon as the curse was deployed, and then Graeme’s spell had thrown it wide open again. Flora slipped through and instinctively tried to close the door behind her, only for it to break from its hinges with a suffering groan.

They were taken back to the room the next day. Flora hadn’t slept. She’d gone upstairs to bed around midnight and wrapped herself around Imani, but she hadn’t really slept. The MLE Dark Arts Terrorism unit, led by this very severe woman who reminded Flora horribly of Mitzi Love, had cobbled together a rough order of events of the evening. “The talismans, six set backstage and one by each door, were deployed precisely at ten-thirty-five PM. The effects would have become known to you at ten-thirty-eight, when the first contraction occurred. Ms. Devlin told us she dropped the curtain at ten-thirty-nine. The first magic signatures on the floor from Mr. Abidi and Ms. Devlin, levitating the concert attendees to prevent a crush, were found at ten-forty-two… and the signature from Mr. Sugarbush, opening the doors, at ten-forty-nine…”

Signature was one way to put it. Graeme’s magic had blown open every door in the entire building, even the ones that hadn’t been magically locked. Touching a doorknob felt like shaking his hand. It was pretty unbelievable magic, even coming from somebody who tended to regularly do pretty unbelievable magic. It made sense what Sal had said, that he had paid for it through the nose.

“Why does this matter,” Imani had asked the severe woman. “It doesn't matter what time everything happened — it doesn't matter what we did. Somebody dropped those talismans. We’ve described him to you. Why haven’t you found him yet?”

The severe woman sighed. “Disguises and glamours are so regularly used among Dark Arts Terrorist groups that quite simply there is no point in putting out any kind of A.P.B. on the person you described.”

“What about the magical signature?” Flora asked. “You can tell ours apart from everybody else’s…”

“Talismans make that more complicated.”

“But not impossible!”

The offices here on the top floor had peeled open like a rotted orange, opening their guts toward the sky. The buckling wood floors were carpeted with assorted paperwork that had burst and blown free from all of Evvy’s meticulously arranged filing cabinets when Graeme’s spell had yanked the doors off everything. Years’ worth of band riders, record contracts, tax forms, articles in the _Prophet_ and _T.M.M._ and _W.R.W._ about the bands Evvy managed and the scene at her club… Flora knelt carefully to filter through all the ruined paper but had to get up again quickly when she found the _Prophet_ feature from the first Hobgoblins show of the D&R residency in June ’85. Eternalized in photograph, ink spreading and running in the rain: her younger self standing as tall and straight as she could, heels, estate sale jewels, fur stole, red lip, staring fiercely into the balcony, Jack leaning against her to play the solo on “In the Garden.”

They were brought home, they were brought back. “The Wizengamot has authorized an advanced interrogation,” said the severe woman, who Imani and Flora and Sal had taken to calling ‘Evil Mitzi.’

“Are you going to torture us,” said Imani flatly, like she wouldn’t’ve been surprised if the answer was yes.

“Far from it,” said Evil Mitzi. “It’s a very simple and very brief operation using a Pensieve. You’ll be sedated, we remove the relevant memories, we comb through them, we return them to you, intact and unharmed.”

They were both speechless. Evil Mitzi looked to each of them in turn with a grotesque expectancy. Finally Imani said, “You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious,” said Evil Mitzi, the steady, shellacked moue of her practiced nonthreatening semi-smile faltering ominously. “In fact, I have a court order.”

Flora was truly dumbfounded. “Didn’t you tell us just yesterday that our memories are useless because the fucker in the green suit must have been wearing a glamour?”

“There may be other important clues in your memories that you did not process or absorb as clues, which a practiced memorimancer will be equipped to recognize. We’ll be ready to perform the procedure tomorrow. Then we’d like to see Mr. Abidi… and Mr. Sugarbush, if we can find him…”

“I won’t do it,” Imani said. “We won’t do it, none of us will do it. I can't believe I keep having to tell you that you're wasting your fucking time tormenting us like this when these people are still out there and gearing up for another one!”

Evil Mitzi reached toward them across the table. Flora could feel the cold, paralyzing magic leaching out of her, and, dimly, in a rapidly shuttering corner of her mind, recognized that this must be some or another interrogation technique taught in whatever offshore bunker the Ministry used to train its most feared enforcers. The rest of her was frozen with terrible and sourceless and all-consuming fear. “Do you understand how easy it would be for me to destroy you,” Evil Mitzi said. Her voice was about three octaves lower than normal and her face was pale as death and all the air in the room was thin and red. “You’ll never work again. You’d be lucky to show your face outside your flat. They’ll be burning your records in the streets. You’d be begging me to send you to Azkaban. Do you understand?”

At home, Sal was pacing in the kitchen. “What happened?” Imani went upstairs to lie down, so Flora told him. “You can’t do it,” said Sal.

“We have to,” said Flora. “It would be incredibly easy for her to destroy all of us.”

Sal said he was going out for a walk and years later told them he had tried to go to a Muggle travel agency and buy a plane ticket home to Dublin but all the computer and telephone equipment in the office had suddenly gone out of order, and then a white van had tailed him back to the house on Belgrade Road. Flora went upstairs and wrapped herself around Imani in the cold bed until she could feel Imani’s heartbeat inside her own chest. They didn't speak nor sleep. All night they watched the shadow of the moon move against the wall and in the morning the white van took them back to the featureless rooms. Some rudimentary medical equipment had been set up — hospital cots, IV stands — and there was a man sitting in the corner behind a table draped in a white cloth, upon which had been rested an unmarked copper bowl.

Something about the setup seemed occult and sacrificial. _They could kill us now and nobody would ever know_ , Flora thought. She took her shoes off and lay down on one of the cots. “You keep an eye on those, now,” she told Evil Mitzi poisonously. “They’re vintage Terry de Havilland.”

She stared at the ceiling. She hardly felt the shot. She felt Imani take her hand. Then nothing.

In Evvy’s office, Flora went through every drawer in the desk, every file cabinet, every closet. Nothing. Went down the hall to Croydon’s office and went through all the order forms for lighting equipment, all the green accounting ledgers going back decades, bank slips and loan authorizations and ticket sales reports. Nothing. Halfway down the hall to the last office, functionally a kind of storage space that the sound and lighting crews used sometimes, and where Saint Rose had on occasion recorded radio spots and interviews into the phone, the building heaved and struggled so violently that it knocked Flora off her feet. For a moment she lay there looking up into the shrinking strip of pale morning sky beyond the jagged rift in the ceiling, thinking, _So this is the end_. Then, on its heels, _No, it’s not. It can't be._

Lying there on the floor she summoned all the magic she could muster from the glowing space behind her heart and spoke it into the broken, suffering building to which she had given so much of her life and her art and her self. She said the same thing she wished she could say to Imani, to Sal and Graeme, to Moira and the Sluagh, to Evvy and Croydon, wherever they were — the same thing she wished she could say to herself and believe: _Hold on. Just hold on for one more minute. Just let me find the thing I came here for. And then you can break down, then you can let go. I promise._

At home, Sal was pacing in the kitchen. Flora should have guessed that something was up because of the way he hugged each of them tightly, but her brain still felt partially numb from the sedative. “Graeme called,” Sal said. He was grinning tremendously but it hardly went further than his eyes. “He's alive. He said something about catastrophic magic shock and severe splinching. And rehab.”

This last word filtered through Flora’s awareness, stirred up some ancient guilt, and snuck out through her ear. “Where?”

“I told him not to tell me.”

Imani had half-collapsed into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “Thank god,” she said.

They actually slept that night, although Flora later suspected that Sal had put something in their after-dinner tea. In the morning, when she got up feeling entirely unrefreshed (something about the evil dreams) and went downstairs to put the kettle on, he was gone. He had left a note on the kitchen table: _Can't hack this one anymore, girls. I love you both and I know we will see each other again. — SO’CA_. Flora thought it would only be a couple days before the MLE hauled him in, but by some miracle or by the pure force of Sal’s desperate genius they never did.

The old suffering hulk of D&R seemed to breathe. So did Flora. Eventually she got up, her magical light bobbing with her. The door into the final office had been blown through the far wall, and the boxes of supplies — color lenses for stage lights, incomprehensible tools, replacement parts for the sound board and various amps — were strewn across the room. Flora went to the desk with the phone where the four of them had clustered together to read from the little scripts that had been faxed over from the U.S. and Canada and France and Italy: “Hi, this is Flora St. James from Saint Rose and you’re listening to…” And lo and behold, in the top left drawer, behind a roll of destroyed mints and a change box and a pad of sticky notes, novelty pens from assorted wizarding retailers, a single expired condom, a flask, a bottle of baby aspirin; beyond all the various and sundry detritus of the world in which they had lived before and would never touch again, there was a box of cassette tapes labeled in her own handwriting: _SAINT ROSE LP2 DEMOS JAN-FEB ’93_.

Flora carefully lifted the box free and held it against her chest like a baby until she could feel the heartbeat of the music echoing inside the great cavernous emptiness. Then she descended through the wreckage of the building and clambered out into the bright day, out into the new world, and set off into the summer streets of London toward home and Imani, toward the shapeless, discordant mess of the future and the world beyond.

\---

\--

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [roll credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWUC2-ypnDQ)
> 
> all the music in chapters 5-9 is [here](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/644299336482750464/saint-rose-and-the-thorns-fluorescentgrey)
> 
> thank you all so very very much for caring as much as i do about this world and these characters. there will be more coming...


End file.
